


Satellite

by Mauser_Frau



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Childhood Trauma, Complex Relationship, Dead animals, Gore, Heat Stroke, Hurt/Comfort, I did what i could with the materials I had, I don't actually know how to tag some of this content, Masturbation, Mercy Kill, Multi, Past Child Neglect, Period Sex, Pretentious Literary References, Prostitution, Referenced suicide, Scars, Slow Burn, Smut, Squick, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Troy’s PoV, Twincest, a lot of blood actually, dead dove do not eat, decidedly unwholesome, forgot to mention the vomit, h/c, medical gore, most everything graphic, rather a lot of drool, sexual misuse of firearms, supernatural destruction of a fetus, terrible joke about troy having his red wings goes here, the calypso protection squad prefers him on the soft side yes, yes that is a ship tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-07-29
Packaged: 2021-03-02 16:54:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 53,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24200143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mauser_Frau/pseuds/Mauser_Frau
Summary: The twins try to make it on Pandora. Everything goes to hell. Troy finds himself faced with increasingly difficult decisions about his future… and his sister's life.Complete as of 7/29/2020.  What a wild ride that was! Hats off to everyone who jumped on and everyone who’s yet to stumble across the wreckage.The wreckage is exactly what it says on the tin.  Please bend, fold and read the tags.
Relationships: Troy Calypso/Tyreen Calypso
Comments: 16
Kudos: 56
Collections: Grimeverse





	1. Chapter 1

“Wish I could fuck your arm hole,” said the guy who already had his cock in him to the hilt. His hands squeezed on his hips, rough and biting. He grabbed him, pulled out suddenly, then stuck him again. 

It made Troy shudder. He didn’t say anything back— this was a two part trick and he had his mouth put to use as well.

The guy kept talking though, somewhere above the slick sounds of their bodies. “That’d be a trip. Go to Pandora, get drunk, shove my dick right into somebody’s chest ‘cause he’s got an orifice where his damn arm belongs.”

“God,” said the girl. Troy didn’t know who she was talking to. She moaned. Her pulse stammered on Troy’s lips.

“That’s just Tuesday here, aight?” In the next moment, he had let go and skimmed his hands upwards over Troy to the bottom of his scar. He worked his touch as though he was fingering someone, although he couldn’t reach all of the way to the dip. This was small and fragile-looking, but full of hard sinew underneath. Troy couldn’t imagine anyone wanting it.

He didn’t want it himself. He bit down his anger and he turned his wet face to the guy. “Not the hole you paid to fuck,” he snapped.

The guy sneered at him and rode him down. “Guess not,” he said.

Troy left it at that. He put himself back to the girl, best as he could. The guy got rougher again, making Troy’s whole body seethe like heat shimmer when he thrust. He nearly knocked him out from his place between the two of them.

The girl was thick and creamy, her mound covered in dark curls. She clenched on Troy when he dabbed his tongue into her. Troy couldn’t do that and suck her clit at the same time. There was so much of her and her salt made his mouth water.

Troy enjoyed giving head. He’d have offered only that if money hadn’t been an issue. Women were his favorite, but all bodies held tastes and smells and quirks he’d been denied back in the vault. This girl in particular made him long to open his mouth wider and get more of her in one gulp. He’d thought of that before, but tonight it lay hot in the back of his head.

Maybe because the whole scene hurt. The guy felt vengeful now, the way his nails bit into Troy’s skin and his cock drove him down. The condom lube hadn’t held. The sandy floor nipped at Troy’s knees. He must have been bent over between this trick for half an hour already. There’d been a lot of almost-flirting and teasing before. He hadn’t expected to get slammed around.

And he hadn’t expected an orgasm to hit him in the nerves out of the blue. He had to pull off of the girl and she mewed at him, but he needed the air and when it was over, when he was panting again, he went back to her. She felt wetter than before. She closed her thighs around him this time, saying “Yeah, you like that, you rangy, little slut.”

The guy laughed and hollered. Said something about riding and a good time.

Troy kept his mind on the girl. When she came soon after he’d moved back to her clit, she ground on him. That hurt too, her spilling hot down his chin, her breaths echoing in his ears. It hurt good though. Troy had just dipped in to give her a second when the guy jerked him back and got to be that stuttering, swearing kind of done with him.

The three of them landed in a lean-to heap against the barroom crates. A lamp swayed above them in the breeze through the window, air sour with the scent of their bodies.

The guy got up first. He dangled the tied condom for Troy and the girl to see, then dropped it with a splash into what was probably a trash can. The girl laughed, pulling away from Troy. It was the last he felt of her skin on his cheeks and they stuck together a little. Troy dropped down so he was almost sitting. His back popped when he did. He started to ask for a bar mop to clean up the streaks of sperm he’d left, but the guy tossed a handful of sawdust down, grains catching on the girl’s wet thighs. That left only one more thing for the three of them to talk about.

“I’ll take my money now,” said Troy.

“Right, right. Sure,” the girl answered. She sat up herself, making no effort to push her skirt back into place. She tapped a few buttons on the heads-up display embedded in her arm. Troy felt his whole self ping. The sound from his ECHO device seemed an afterthought. “Fifty good old Hyperian Buttdollars,” she added and she stretched in the most careless way before stumbling to her feet.

The guy gave a snort. “You sound like a brat kid when you talk like that.” Though, he sounded as though he enjoyed this.

“A brat kid who indulges your weird thing for bumming blue-eyed boys, so shut your mouth.”

“You shut  _ your _ mouth.” He growled. “This one doesn’t need to know about that stuff.”

“Maybe.” The girl gave Troy a wink and the conversation wandered on without him after that; wandered on as though he’d been a drift of gravel across a highway and here, they had passed it.

It was fine. Troy was slick with bruises to his flanks, his ass twitching and raw, but he hadn’t gotten punched in the face or called anything worse than slut. He was also alone despite the crackles of voices elsewhere in the building.

Troy DeLeon did not understand how to be alone. The thought of trying knotted the pit of his stomach. He wasn’t supposed to be alone. In realizing that he almost could be, he groped his ECHO out of his clothes and whispered to it, “Hey, I’m done here. Back soon,” then waited for an answer, his ear pressed to the plastic shell.

“OK,” it said finally.

He dressed, checked his account, and showed himself out into the restless Pandoran night. Every stone and scrap building leaked heat into the moon-cooled air. Rakks chattered somewhere in the distance towards the edge of town. Troy stopped to try and catch sight of their hive. Rakkhives still creeped him out between their enormity and their strange place in the ecosystem. He wanted to see more until they stopped bothering him. He wasn’t getting very far on this planet if he couldn’t at least do that for himself.

Otherwise, he carried a sense of having eaten well although he was exhausted and sore. He licked the last of the girl cum from the corner of his mouth and walked back to his sister with his one gun drawn in his one hand. The weight did not comfort him, but he was used to it and the night movement of the desert circling his footfalls.

His attention flickered from likely hiding spot to high sniper bluffs in the distance to shadows filled with out-of-key sounds. Once he tipped his head back and he caught a slow-shooting point of light tracing across the star line, somebody else’s ship landing or leaving. Leaving he thought, based on the tail and the rough angle it made back towards the center of the Milky Way. He didn’t watch it much further than that. There was a clatter in the distance, one that came from a lantern at the crook of two dunes.

At least he knew more or less what had made it then. 

Tyreen was light and small with a resting sneer. In the silhouette of the work light hanging over their SAT-V, she almost disappeared. “Whatcha get?” she said, rather than hello.

“Fifty and some shit beer,” Troy answered.

“Where’s the beer?”

“I drank it.”

Tyreen stalked across the sand. “Huh.” She was carrying a screw in her mouth like a cigarette. 

Troy gave it a flick that landed on her nose.

She insisted, “Shoulda tipped ammo if you did butt stuff.”

“Yeah, well. It was that or be broke again tomorrow. Did you fix the car?”

“It starts. Can’t get that thing for the front on.” She jerked her wrist towards the replacement grill. It had been bent when they’d stolen it. Even in the dimness, it now looked decidedly more bent.

“Close enough,” said Troy. He turned back to his sister and tried to be serious about looking her in the eyes. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do. Her little face and that screw and...

He had to ask her though. The fog had started nagging his upper spine back in town. Now thin plumes of numbness crept over his cheeks, down into the places where his body remembered Tyreen used to be. The symptoms weren’t so bad when they started. If the beer had gotten him drunk, then feeling himself beginning to die got him  _ deliciously _ drunk.

The fact remained: Troy didn’t want to die. “Can you feed me?” he asked.

Tyreen slapped his hand into hers. Their markings turned to glow worms in the dark, lines of light creeping through subtle shifts of color. Troy felt no movement and there wasn’t any warmth to it. Getting a draught from his sister came to him as something he couldn’t quite name inside of himself unfastening and accepting. Every numb streak and twinge he knew opened so wide that they disappeared. Tonight, it flooded his mouth with the sensation of meat. He got a strong urge to chew, even knowing nothing was there.

Troy tried to turn his wrist and give her fingers a squeeze. “What did you eat?”

“Nothing great.” She pulled herself away before he was finished and finally plucked the screw from her mouth. 

“Sorry. Let’s finish the car in the morning. I’m beat.”

“I just fed you. C’mon.”

“Ty,” he sighed. “Butt stuff. I wanna lie down. OK?”

As her answer, she padded off the way she’d come to him, only this time he followed. They closed up their tool kits and scrubbed off their faces as best they could. Troy still tasted meat. Tyreen couldn’t get the oxide stains off of her cheeks. She turned the work light out before Troy had his bedroll out of the back of the SAT-V. It left him blinking in the moonlight as his eyes focused and then there was Elpis wallowing across the sky, bright and broken as ever.

Also, his sister jerking the flap of their tent closed behind her. He waited for the insect trills to cycle before he followed. By then she’d already balled herself into her own bedroll. The light of whatever she was reading glowed through her zippers. Troy took the far side and put his back to her even before he’d gotten himself covered up. It felt way too damn good to finally make himself flat against the dirt. Living on Pandora he was always back straight or shoved underneath someone else, tight inside with waiting. It had been exhilarating at first, but the money they’d managed to get for the wreck of their ship had only gone so far.

He’d thought selling his body sounded like fun at first. There were still parts he enjoyed— good oral and tricks who made him laugh; getting laid at all. Sex had been impossible back in Nekrotafeyo with only his family for company. Dad had offered him (and only him) a turn in his personal holo room, which was no. Just no. Troy had wanted an experience which was his own. Now none of them were. He wasn’t even his own.

Then again, he’d never been. He probably wouldn’t ever know what that was like.

He turned over his shoulder. Tyreen hadn’t moved. She didn’t react to the rustle of his movement.

“Hey,” he said, “there’s a scorpion.”

“Hey,” she said back, “It won’t live long enough to sting me. It’s  _ your _ problem. Night, you lying sack.”

“Night, Ty.” He licked his lips one more time. The salt was still gone but there he lay, still-half dreaming of being able to open his mouth so wide. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 7/28/2020: edited as part of the final update.


	2. Chapter 2

Troy awoke with Tyreen spooned against him, snoring away. The bottom of the tent was littered with more ECHO components than should have belonged to either of them. Tyreen’s scratched up cherry red model blinked ‘LOW BAT’. She sat up when he did, as though she hadn’t really been asleep. The two of them picked themselves awake through the scattered parts and got to work.

They installed the new grill in less than half an hour with three hands, even though it was bent all to hell and they had to do it by lamplight since the sun wasn’t up yet. Then they packed up camp and headed into town for supplies. The first hint of dawn threw the bluffs lining the road into silhouette. There was still no rakkhive. The rakks themselves were gone as far as Troy could hear, listening out the broken window as the garage guy rang up their refuel.

Troy was glad they’d gotten that taken care of before the tanks heated up in the morning. Hot fuel expanded, meaning they got less for the same price at the pumps. He was less glad that the guy tried to sell them on a plasma lighter from a rickety display at the counter. 

Tyreen pulled her necklace out of her shirt about three exchanges in and held it at him like she had a knife instead. “It’s a striker,” she informed him. “I could be drowned in my own blood and this thing’d light. It’s older than me and it still works. You really expect me to buy another one? Are you stupid?”

Troy snickered at the drowned part. It might have been about his sister and it might have been kind of shitty for him, but he couldn’t help himself. The look on her face. As if she’d snuffed a bottle of acetone.

The clerk leaned back and crossed his arms. “Older,  _ fancy  _ one like they useda give rich girls in Cygnus.”

Half a question lingered on the air. Then another half. Would they admit this was the first they’d heard anything about a Cygnus where anybody lived? Troy wanted to. He wanted that a lot. The guy though wasn’t in a place to answer the rest, the part about where their mother had gotten involved with the matter.

Tyreen struck the flint. She held the sparks up to the guy’s face. “So it’ll last longer than you. Good to know, good to know.”

“Probably,” he shrugged and gestured for one of them to pay up.

The twins did that and left without another word. If they were going anywhere that day, they had more stops beforehand.

The water wherever they’d ended up was clear and not that expensive. That, and they were out. It tasted like old pipes, but plenty of things did on Pandora. 

“I’m buying five gallons,” said Tyreen, helping herself to her brother’s ECHO unit. Troy followed after her so the money, half of their money, would actually come off of the thing. The jugs barely fit in the back of the SAT-V between their gear, but they were holding the compartment closed with a bungee cord anyway.

The water seller snapped the thing as she left them. “These rot in the sun, you know.”

“Unless you’re going to give us something else, don’t wanna hear it,” said Tyreen.

“Well, then. Check any old homestead you find. Might have a chain if the psychos haven’t helped themselves. They do that.” The last part came with a wink towards Troy.

Since he’d been hanging around under the streetlights the last couple of nights, that was a free pass to make comments that approached innuendo. Anyway, he gave her one. She was handsome enough despite her missing teeth. He wouldn’t have minded if she’d bought a trick then and there.

He flashed her a smile.

The waterseller though walked back to her stall beneath where the street sign had once hung before the sun bleached it away. She put her boots up on the tank hood she used as a counter. 

Tyreen was messing with his ECHO again meanwhile. If she’d overheard the exchange, she’d chosen not to listen. “I guess you want people food.”

“Yeah.”

“You get food, I get to drive first.”

It wasn’t a fair trade, but Troy was too hungry to argue. He settled for a plate of whatever breakfast at the bar. It turned out to be powdered eggs and a handful of greasy, fried chips.

Tyreen tilted out of leaning on him to give these a look.

He held one up to her, so close her breath curled the edge with a faint flicker of ash. “Somebody said they’re  _ nopales _ , but I think they’re just called succs. They’re pretty good.”

Having sniffed with all of her might, his sister shook herself out. “Bleh. Doesn’t smell like anything.”

They smelled like grease and green to Troy and they tasted about the same, maybe a little sour. He liked them better than the eggs if only because they crunched. 

Food did plenty enough to get the memory of meat out of his mouth besides stopping his stomach from growling. 

The ratty umbrella covering the bar’s porch rattled as he ate. His sister shoved herself further into his shade with every bite, of which there were only so many and only one lamppost over their heads to make any light at all. In the end there was him and the empty plate and her crammed into a sliver of space. 

He leaned down, kissed her on the top of her head.

Tyreen squeaked. Then, she bolted for the SAT-V.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I must have gone back and forth with myself for an hour about whether or not it was accurate to refer to fried succs as nopales. In the end, I wanted there to be a story where Troy Calypso said the word nopales more than I wanted to worry. 
> 
> Went back and changed the name of their vehicle to account for upcoming functionality. It’s SAT-V going forward. Anyway, on with the show.
> 
> Updated 7/28/2020.


	3. Chapter 3

The SAT-V handled like a fish. Maybe that was a strange thing to think while racing through a desert, but accelerating made the back end sway and the whole world ripple around them. Tyreen had more of a knack for keeping it straight. Tyreen though drove without using the brakes unless she absolutely needed to. They speeded or they coasted with her at the wheel, motion working through waves of engine sputter. 

It made Troy’s back hurt. He wedged himself down in the too-small seat. He would have tried hanging onto the roll bar to see if that helped, but he didn’t exactly have that option. So instead, he looked up and tried not to think about how hard they swayed when they sped up.

The skies had been tinged yellow through dawn. Now, they washed out sallow and finally gray. Clouds and dust plumes spilled across the bluffs and down the pavement still trying to mark something that might have once been a highway.

“Better not fucking rain,” Tyreen said absently. 

“Wrong season,” Troy answered. “And my shoulder’s not bothering me. Guess it’s a dust storm. You want your mask?”

She leaned against the door, propping herself on her knuckles and stirring the wheel with one hand. The SAT-V fished hard. “Nah. My ECHO charged?”

Troy checked the glove slot. “75%.”

“Well, that’s  _ fantastic _ ,” she made a sound of amusement in the back of her throat despite the fact her expression remained serious. Next turn, she was both hands on the wheel again, dabbing her foot on the gas.

The only thing that moved faster through the desert was the dust above them, slipping down in thin funnels as the air currents strummed below the storm. Strange, the wind on the ground wasn’t too bad— just enough to get their hair dirty.

They stopped soon enough, parking between two dustfalls. Troy stumbled out of the SAT-V and tried to work out the kinks creeping through his whole body. Tyreen didn’t go twenty paces from the car before she slid her pants down, stuck her fingers between her legs and proudly pissed on a boulder.

Troy chose not to acknowledge her grinning at him while she did. She could show off for someone who cared how good she was at peeing while standing up. More than a decade later and there he was, still regretting that he’d looked up pointers for her so she could mark strands of Eridian junk the same way he did when they went exploring.

They were kind of exploring now. It felt strange to Troy though that other, real people had gotten involved. He and his sister were driving one more town over, maybe two, based on a broadcast about hunting parties and how it matched up with bar chatter. Travelling hardly seemed like it was what they wanted anymore. It was just something they  _ did _ .

Hadn’t they left Nekrotafeyo to be their own people? Wasn’t that the whole reason they’d come to Pandora, the whole reason they were even still alive?

Tyreen’s elbow interrupted him. “Feels good,” she said, popping her shoulders and swaggering towards the SAT-V. 

He followed, watched her pointing at the sky.

“Cooler than yesterday or back there or something.”

“Yeah, town was nasty last night,” offered Troy. 

“Figured. The way you were acting.” Together, they opened the hatch.

He spun the cap off of one of the jugs of water. “You better wash your hands before you drink.”

She made a show of it, whipping the blue soap leaves out of her pocket and scraping them over her fingers until her cuticles turned turquoise and he smelled a machine shop sink in the back of his mind. Mouth on the jug, Troy stood and took three deep swallows. That was about a cup. He’d measured it before. Tyreen took several smaller sips and left her soapy fingerprints behind. The last swig dribbled down her chin. At least she put the bottle back herself and stuck her hand in Troy’s pack. There she found his mask and held it out to him.

“Thanks,” he said, only half meaning it since it smelled of soap now too. Not that this would last more than a few dozen miles.

“Welcome.”

Colored lenses were more common for filter masks on Pandora, but Troy had managed to find one with polarised polymer. They made everything look washed out. The sky had already turned gray. Wearing that mask, the effect stretched to the horizon and his sister’s eyes

Tyreen meanwhile climbed onto the roll bar beside the passenger seat, her legs kicked off of the side like she meant to ride the whole SAT-V some kind of crazy side-saddle. “I’m DJing,” she said as a gust of wind turned her bangs out of her face.

“Best news I’ve heard all day,” Troy answered. 

The driver’s seat might have been even smaller and the weather looked nothing short of grim now that the mask had darkened his view, but music? He was here for the music. The road opened before them and he floored it.

Tyreen howled with laughter. He would have asked her what was so damn funny, but she also pressed play. 

He’d expected one of the scattershot quick baselines like she tended to choose for their (well, her) driving playlists. Instead he got hit with this sweet, sonorous thud that shook the SAT-V. The melody joined what felt like half a mile away— a guitar strummed up shining, chimes like a broken glass riding along. Somebody’s voice crooned about the night, about ghosts. He couldn’t make more than that over the engine noise, the bass and his sister still laughing like this crush of waiting she'd found in the form of a song was the funniest thing anybody had ever said or done.

Troy laughed too. So much for figuring out what was being sung to him. He couldn’t even hear the wind anymore. He could hardly hear himself asking: “Where’d you find this?”

“Same place I get the other stuff,” Tyreen said. He thought. That was what it looked like she said.

“So, why the hell did…?”

“I wanted to see if I could get the car to shake so hard I got off. Plus, we could sing this one if we had the words. Listened to it twenty damn times last night and I can’t figure ‘em out!”

“You. Are. So. Gross!” Troy shouted, pounding his hand on the steering wheel. The car fished for a few beats. He caught it back. 

Tyreen stayed hung up on the roll bar after, screaming with delight. At one point, she flipped him off, so she was up there one-handed, him with no way to brake. The road was slippery with sand and if he had tried to stop, she would have gone flying. 

The music skipped on the last few notes of whatever song they’d been listening to. Another spun up, faster and skittering in a whole different key. 

It made him want to tell her to click back. So they could sing. Maybe.

Tyreen turned back the way they’d come. Her teeth slipped into her bottom lip. “We got company.”

The rearview mirror had already gotten too dirty to use. Troy couldn’t exactly swipe it clean himself without letting go of the wheel. “It’s a road. People use it sometimes.” He was more trying to keep himself somewhat settled with the words than make a point to her.

That left him sort of glad she didn’t take it that way. “No. Look. It’s...”

“Ty, get back in the car.”

She slid into the passenger seat. Her breath dragged between the thuds of the song beneath them. “You know those bandits that were hanging around the shithole we just left?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s them. Same black and green paint job.”

He questioned how she could make this out in the same moment he chanced a glance over his shoulder. The dirt cloud behind them flashed with neon. He recognized the opera mask motif the bandits used in their graffiti and gear. One of the Outrunners had a giant, white face mounted on the front. 

Troy turned back to the road. He took a breath. “OK. The hell do they want with us?”

“I dunno. Humans are such easy prey?” Tyreen smiled at him again. He could see her from the corner of his eyes, flashing her teeth the way she did when she wanted  _ food  _ at their father as hard as he could. 

“I really don’t think now’s the time for us to go full siren on anybody. There’s twelve of ‘em easy.”

“Oh, c’mon! Who wiped all the varkids off that one cliff face last week?”

“Varkids don’t have guns!”

“Might as well!” 

A rocket shot past the passenger side. It smashed into the road a mere handful of yards off. Troy jerked them around the smoulder. Tyreen yanked her ECHO off of the speakers and fingered her ears as though she thought they might be bleeding. 

Troy’s mind slithered with the question of  _ what next _ . He stamped the gas pedal. The cliffs, the clouds were a blur now. He did not feel the fish, not even in his aching spine. “You really wanna fight?”

“I don’t wanna…” She trailed off, shaking herself. “I don’t wanna die running, how’s that?”

“Fine, just…” Another rocket screeched past. This one went wide and sent stones bursting from a nearby cliff face. “Get the guns. Be ready to brace yourself on my mark.”

She squirmed past him to reach the packs crammed behind their seats. She was hip to his scars and he was telling himself  _ don’t be an idiot, don’t put your head up _ when the only person he meant was her. He willed her to move faster. 

It was hardly a flash and she dropped back, two guns and a lapful of spare magazines. She stuffed what she could into his pockets where he hadn’t loaded himself up. “Don’t you sound professional,” she tried to tease him. 

It didn’t work. Troy was still head in the angles of what he was about to do. There wouldn’t be any trying here. If he didn’t pull this off, he and his sister… 

(He watched her cram another magazine down her shirt.)

…were gonna get blown to ratshit.

Their engine popped as he tapped the gas. The roar of other SAT-Vs and Outrunners mounted behind them. He took a deep breath.

“Troy?” said Tyreen.

He should wait for another rocket. Whoever had the launcher would be reloading for a handful of seconds once one fired. He’d timed situations like this over and over in the combat simulators back in the ruins of Dad’s ship, the places their parents had decided made a damn fine playroom.

That was his thought as the third rocket arced over the SAT-V. Trying to shoot where he was already driving? It fit right into his plan.

“Love you. Mark.”

Troy didn’t know what, if anything, his sister said back.

He slammed his foot on the break.

The two of them and all their water threw forward. He thought he heard Tyreen choking at the shock. One of the tires blew. Shrapnel and ash from the road slammed back their way. A sudden, rushing stillness filled the air. They’d been moving. Now they weren’t. He’d smacked the steering wheel so hard that bile welled behind his teeth. He should have turned his shield on before hitting the breaks, but he’d half a thought it might have broken on impact. Shields were meant for bullets, not blunt blows.

Bandits careened into view, skidding in the sand.

He heard Tyreen open fire an instant before he did. 

Even if it made him look like a dumb bastard, he braced his repeater pistol against the SAT-V door and used that to steady his fire. Their pursuers weren’t more than dirt and fluorescent paint, but Troy sprayed them straight on down the sight with the weapon dancing in his hand, chewing up the metal beneath it. When it clicked empty, he switched to another magazine, flipping the empty one out with his thumb and bracing the body of the gun with his own as he moved. Tyreen threw her empties for a change. He heard her say, “Go down already, you shit-fucking piece of mother,” her voice so angry it cracked. 

That was all in the heartbeats before the blow.

One of the bandit Outrunners slammed into them. It was probably on purpose. Not that it mattered.

Troy sprawled out of the SAT-V. It cracked into flames an instant later. Hot metal sprayed across his back. Some of it landed as his shield whined. The empty sleeve of his shirt smouldered in the aftershock.

What would the bandits even be thinking out there, watching him rise like a thunderhead against the fire they’d brought down? There were war cries behind him too, sparking gunfire from Tyreen’s Maliwan submachine gun. What about the ones who went down under his little sister’s boot?

He dodged behind a stone rather than watch the light show. Tyreen could gloat at him later. Better to have someplace to brace his weapon when he needed to reload. His shield was only half up or the buzzer was broken.

Voices came. “Flesh for flesh! Blood for blood! Fuck for fuck!”

And then— “Where’s the little bitch?”

But  _ bitch _ went out in a spattering crunch. 

So that was one more down. A tink lay far off in the smoke, unmoving. The driver of the Outrunner that had hit them had a canyon of blood and bone open on their face. Another SAT-V had overturned, its driver unaccounted for. A laser sight kept tracking up his side of the road, searching for his signal or his chest. Not good. Troy and the person with the sight were too far apart for him to draw a decent bead in the chaos— at least three people besides Tyreen shooting.

If he’d had time to look, he still couldn’t have seen her. She was a kinetic wreck of a fighter, nearly impossible to hold in sights. Always reeling and changing and feinting with her shadow if she had one. In the dust she did not, but it hardly seemed to matter from the sound of things. She was still laughing.

He and she stood back to back across the sand, separated by a handful of yards. A smarter force would have split them for the half second of their reaction, but the bandits, pinned or still hanging on that  _ little bitch _ let them stand as they were, one  _ thing  _ in the middle of it all.

“The fuck are they on about!?” Troy shouted.

Shots passed. Tyreen reloaded. Her shield flashed against his vision. “Whatever it is, it’s shit ‘cause somebody over here keeps missing me by like a mile! Huh? Was that you, cum-for-brains?” She brought all hell down on whoever she’d singled out, enough to make the ground smoke. 

“I meant...” Troy stopped himself. It didn’t matter. 

He wanted to take her hand. It would have been so stupid. Making one target of the two of them like that. But he did want. 

Drawing himself away from the urge, he cried, “Nobody calls my sister names and lives. Maybe if you guys start licking some boot, we’ll let you live!” It was a dumb thing to say. And impossible: nobody on this planet surrendered. But the act of saying it, that gave him a hell of a rush.

He wasn’t the only one.

The bandit with the rifle charged. One shot tricked off of Troy’s shield, smashing somewhere in the desert. Another melted away. Two more broke out far from the vestige of his footprints. He fired. Fired and fired until his whole body felt he must be following the weapon's beat. In fights like this, he longed for something more intimate in his arsenal. He wanted to taste the edges of his foes’ lives the same way his sister did. They might mean something to him that way. He remained so, so curious about the whole concept that was other people, even dead ones walking in his presence.

He came face to face with a man. The polymer in his mask eyes was red, but only one lens remained. The white of his bare eye glistened sore and wet. His breath crushed loud in his chest. A handful of those syringes that vault hunters dined on, all adrenaline and uppers, hung from his belly like spines.

“Flesh for flesh,” he said, cocking the rifle.

Troy reached out to him. Kind of the way his sister did. There was a trick to it. He had to go so slow and only turn his gun at the last.

The bandit’s shield bit him, bit him hard. But this one jab of clarity got through it and he fired.

None of the man’s blood made it through the glare. It spattered on the backside of the shield as bullets coursed through him. “About that,” Troy said. The man’s middle was red slop by the time he hit the ground.

He flung himself back behind the stones as they pinged and shook with gunfire. The bandits called for him as he fought to reload one more time.  _ Let it be just one more time _ , he told himself.

He went measured bursts about the others he caught in his sights. He figured one was trying to get behind him, but they weren’t. They simply  _ weren’t  _ at a certain point. Out of sight, out of range, out of life. He’d worry about the moving targets he could actually aim for. Soon enough things would get quiet on his side of the road. The bandits couldn’t last forever. The same went for him. In his adrenaline, he barely acknowledged that much.

He’d figured— what —there were a dozen? Troy counted the deaths he’d heard. Two more living bandits. Likely on his sister’s side of things. 

He could hear footsteps between his own bullets. All of a sudden, that was all he could hear. He finally looked over his shoulder.

Tyreen strode across the sand and ashes like the whole valley was her nightclub. It was kind of fucking perfect and it was kind of like she finally wore shadow in the heat of the dust clouds straying over the valley. She held one bandit in her sights.

And  _ fuck _ .

She walked right up to her even though she was brandishing a buzz saw from a stance better used for a sword. 

“Give up,” Tyreen said. Her voice rang so clear. 

The woman bowed her head. There was blood smeared all over her legs where she knelt. She was probably expecting to be a clean headshot and maybe a story tomorrow.

Tyreen though shoved the palm of her hand in the woman’s face. She was gone in a violet heartbeat, crackling into a statue of herself.

Tyreen nodded. She looked at her marked hand. She peered through her fingers to the dunes.

The bullet hit an instant later.

Not a bandit pistol. Those things were common as skags. Some branded thing from off-world. Something with power behind it 

Her shields snapped to pieces. She bled. Her knees buckled.

She and Troy both fired. The bandit with the pretty pistol gave his ghost away and there were sparks, somewhere in the blur of Troy’s vision.

He was running. He still didn’t catch her. 

His sister went down on her knees. She laughed. He’d never heard her like this. It was so beautiful and broken against the silence. 

She said, “Hey, it's like that book you usedta read me. Shot people really don’t go  _ back _ . This is so weird.”

She took a breath and fell forwards into the sand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 7/28/2020: Going into the final stretch for edits so everything meshes with the ending.


	4. Chapter 4

Troy killed the last three bandits— the one spotting the man who’d shot Tyreen and two more holded up in a gully, waiting for their prey to drop his guard. That made a handful more bodies than Troy had figured. The sand was littered with dead and their smoking silhouettes. 

He should have gone to celebrate with his sister after things fell quiet. These would hardly have been the first kills they’d spun each other ‘round to. Hardly at all. Hell, by that time in their place on Pandora, the dance was something he loved.

They got to be together when everyone else was dead. It wasn’t fine, but it was something they shared, something he wanted to share with her now.

Instead, Troy shoved his gun in his waistband like an idiot and dove back to the brush where he’d dragged Tyreen.

She’d rolled onto her side and drawn her gun. It clattered in her shaking hand in the second it took her to recognize him. She put it down and moaned, clutching her belly.

"Hey. Deep breath. We’re gonna get you fixed up.”

Tyreen coughed. “I can’t. It hurts.”

“Just try, OK?”

The rage in the look she gave him. But she did what he’d asked, puffing her cheeks out when she couldn’t get the air down on the first try. She held herself for a second and she retched, mucus and stomach slough. No blood though. The breath she managed after shook her whole body. 

Troy toed dirt over the spatter, then knelt and dabbed her face with his shirt. “It’s good you got that out. I know it sucks.”

She was panting now. He thought he heard her try to talk, so he waited until she calmed down to say anything else. 

The next part felt callous of him, but so had dropping her into a tangle of dry branches when all he wanted to do was cradle her close. “I gotta go back to the car and get our stuff. You stay here and try to relax. Deep breaths when you can.”

“No,” she choked. “Don’t go. Don’t.”

“I can’t do anything like this. I need the med kit.” 

She grabbed him. Her hand quivered. So did her voice. “I said don’t go!” Her nails left red crescents on his forearm as he fought her off of him. They looked like plain bruises between his markings, though they bled as he ran.

“I’m gonna kill you!” she screamed after him.

Troy looked over his shoulder. His own next breath threw his vision white around the edges. He’d needed to breathe too. He barely realized he hadn't been.

Their SAT-V was still hot and treacherous with jagged edges. He tore through it regardless.

Two of the water jugs had survived.

The bottom had blown out of his pack. Some of the camping hardware had spilled. The coil of nylon rope stuck to the trunk, but he got part of it loose. He still had one long knife and a trowel with a sharp edge. The MREs were mostly alright. There were Mylar-lined emergency blankets and plastic kitting and thankfully the med kit; his desert cloak and spare clothes. Condoms and candy and a film map that might have been older than him, now leaking ink onto his hands. 

Tyreen’s had been carrying most of the munitions and they’d ignited. Her clothes were cinders except for a scarf-sized wisp of the cloak. He couldn’t find her ECHO.

The tent was a lost cause. Nothing remained of their bedrolls. The car kit seemed alright. And her medical supplies… All of a sudden, he couldn’t remember if she’d been carrying any. Every time he thought of Tyreen, he saw her back in the brush, saw her going down. That was all she could be to him in that moment. It made sense at least, even if it was about as rational as wanting to sit with her while she was wearing an open wound.

In his desperation, Troy tried to raid the Outrunners and other SAT-Vs. He found a lot of gummed-up, blown out engines leaking bullets. The bandits had been travelling not light, but empty, as though they expected they’d be driving back to their camp with nothing lost.

He gave up searching the wreckage and went back to his sister with his hands covered in ashes. 

Tyreen had brought her gun up to her chest. She clung to it rather than level it at him. She had nothing else to hang onto at that point. “The fuck’re you doing?” she mumbled. “Said I was gonna kill you, right? Better run.”

“Maybe later,” Troy sighed, crouching beside her. “I got the med kit.”

He was half-expecting she’d mouth off again or say something about her own damn med kit. Why didn’t he remember if she had one? He was going to have to spend most of this one on her and then there wouldn’t be much left if anything  _ else  _ happened.

Troy nudged her hip. “Let’s get you on your back so I can see what I’m doing.”

“No,” Tyreen wadded herself into a tighter ball. 

It made him wince, thinking what that felt like given her injury.

“You didn’t even wanna look before. Not enough blood, right? Not your top priority!”

“We were being shot at!” He shook his head, and tried again to get her to move. At the third touch he realized that she might need help, but he also felt something in her body resisting him. Troy pushed up on his knees, leaning over her. He yanked his mask down over his throat. “Please?”

Tyreen stared at him. A trace of his shadow bloomed across her as the clouds nearly snagged apart. “Stop that,” she murmured, but the anger had gone from her voice.

He gave her one more nudge. This time she moved with him, shifting her legs so she spilled over at the change in tension. She cursed and winced when she landed.

Troy debated pushing her knees up. That was more blood to warm the center of her body, but it was also more to rush out of her if things went wrong in the next few minutes. He ended up putting her boots on his pack since it wasn’t that high. Tyreen laid her gun aside, finally clicking the safety on as she did.

Then he peeled the sticky mess of her shirt up.

Scars dappled Tyreen’s body. The bullet had breached the oldest one, the rippled, thick skin covering her right flank. He’d lost bones and veins and his very ability to live getting cut away from her, but she’d needed enough artificial skin for an adult in a serious car accident. She hadn’t filled in quite right on that side— there were hard lines and odd angles that didn’t match her muscles. Besides, if he minded having his scars handled, she seemed calmer when he touched hers, even now, swiping disinfectant over her side. 

She gasped at the sting. He pulled a glove on with his teeth and pinned a flashlight in his mouth. Now was time to be clinical as he got with any of his engineering projects. He put his mind to that.

There was one entry, no exit, a steady trickle of dark red mixed with thin, watery liquid that came faster when she breathed in. The edges of the wound were ragged. He put his hand to the curve of her belly, feeling gently. For what he wasn’t sure. He doubted he could gather much from the outside. All he got was more of her out of place firmness on his palm. She bled heavier when he pressed. He chanced a second time, peering inside of his sister with his finger on the edge of her wound. He wasn’t trying to ply her open for a better look, but he had a hunch.

Troy spit the flashlight out. “I can see the bullet.” 

Tyreen shot him a glare. "Take it out.”

“No.”

“What?”

“I’m not taking it out. That’ll make it worse.”

“I don’t want it in me!” Her fist came down on his knee. “Take it out right now!”

“You’ll hemorrhage and your guts might fall out. ‘cause fun fact, I can see those too!” Though exactly what part of her insides he’d gotten a glimpse of, he couldn’t say. Slick, shimmering tissue lined the wound. It wasn’t any part of her that was supposed to be open to the air. He knew that much. 

Tyreen’s next blow bruised, but it stayed with him as the pain faded, as she held on. She rolled one shoulder against the ground and looked up at him. “Please?” The word was wet in her mouth.

“No.” Troy shook his head. “I  _ can’t _ , OK? I’m gonna bandage you up. That’s all I can do without hurting you worse.”

She didn’t say anything more, but spread her hand open over him before she turned to the sky. 

Managing a field dressing for her would have been simple enough for someone with two hands. Troy had to think his way through the whole process before he started. He’d expected after all the simulations he’d poured over it would come easily. Out in the desert, he struggled to put the steps in an order that didn’t leave his supplies broken or contaminated. Everything had played out so different from he’d imagined. He didn’t have a prosthetic. He wasn’t rescuing some pretty bandit boy or girl who’d begged him to save them.

He didn’t think he’d be distracting himself from a lousy trick with  _ that _ image ever again. 

Troy sliced open a package of hemostatic sponges with a scissors blade. He almost cut himself on top of everything else. He held the bottom of the bag open with his teeth to get one out. Another toppled into the sand, a waste. 

There was something profoundly unnerving about pressing anything into a hole in his sister’s stomach. The fact he felt her pop on his fingertip as he pulled out made him flinch. Tyreen made a vague sound of discomfort.

“Should set in a minute,” said Troy.

She nodded and tried to close her eyes. At least, she was doing a damn good job of not looking at him. Her breath caught then and she shifted. “Hey?”

“Yeah?”

“Are these things supposed to get warm?”

Troy spoke even as he was skimming the text on the back of the bag, “Well, there are a few older clotting agents that do that. Most of those last longer in the field, so umm…” He read. The text made no sense to him. Nothing settled in his mind.

Tyreen’s next huff broke into a moan. “Troy, what…?” Her hands scrabbled toward her wound. She managed to pull herself away, take another drag of the dusty air. Her heart was pounding like an amphetamine overdose. He could see it in the way her pulse made her hands twitch. Her eyes when she glanced up at him had gone so wide. 

He didn’t need to know what the packet said. “It’s gonna hurt really bad.”

The hell with it. He could get another glove. The next time she reared, he threw his arm across her shoulders and pinned her down.

“What the fuck!” she protested as he pulled her close.

In the next handful of instants, she fought him. Her boots pounded on his pack. There was nothing in it for her to break and he didn’t mind. She hissed and snarled like an animal. No words came out when she screamed. She just wailed, the sound cracking off the bluffs as she shook in his arms. Her fingers got into the cuts she’d already given him, then her mouth when she bit him. 

But he was still holding her when she burst into tears. He knew that the screams would end, but feeling her gag and cry against him? That lasted what seemed like forever and his heart refused to remind him this would ever end. Tyreen hardly ever cried. Then there she was, tears streaming down her face, sobbing so hard that every muscle in her body kept squeezing on nothing.

He should have given her something to bite that wasn’t so soft as his skin. He should have, but he hadn’t.

Troy pushed his face into the crook of her shoulder and nuzzled, blowing on her neck in the hope it might get her breathing to even out. Tyreen strained against him as another wave of pain struck her. Then she bit him so hard. He felt his skin splitting on her teeth.

And then this little kiss; this small, damp thing on the bloody marks she’d opened. Her tongue slipped against him, tracing that rent and one her nails had left earlier. Another long slip, she wept and screamed again, but she was back to him soon enough, licking the blood and sweat away.

Troy watched her mouth move over him. He figured it wouldn’t hurt her if she only got a little of his blood.

Tyreen was still sniveling when she managed to talk. He’d been expecting her to call him names, but instead: “I… I think I wet my pants.” She slid out of that into another fit of sobs.

He only let go of her once that had passed. Before he did anything else, he rubbed a little water on her face so her tears didn’t get sticky. Then he checked her jeans. They were damp, but so were his cargo pants in the heat. “If you did, it’s just a little. But we’ll get your clothes off when we’re done.” Now that she’d quieted down and wasn’t bleeding anymore, he thought ‘we’ might be a comfort. “Wanna help me put the big bandage on?”

“OK,” Tyreen said weakly. She looked utterly exhausted, felt it too as he touched her wrist. Her heart was tapping away and her sweat had dried cool on her skin. Her eyes were starting to drift closed.

Troy tried to make an estimate of how much blood she was down. So much had seeped into the ground. A winding streak traced back to where she’d fallen at the first. She was still wearing stains of it. So was he.

Half a liter, he figured. It looked like more because it was cut with interstitial fluid. This still wasn’t good, especially if he’d calculated low. But it wasn’t fatal. If he could keep her rested and talking until help arrived…

First he had to finish with her. Troy pulled on another glove. The occlusive dressing had a pull tab he managed to sheer off without using his mouth. He’d overstuffed the wound a little. The sponge left a lump on the side of her belly underneath the plastic. 

He rinsed her one more time with disinfectant and sterile saline, then had her push up onto her shoulders so together they could wrap the emergency bandage around her. He let her set the fastener herself.

“All set,” said Troy.

Tyreen sighed, sinking back to the dirt. She shoved at her waistband until he got the hint, stripped off her boots and her jeans. Then she snapped her panties at him too. Her shirt he cut off since it was ruined. The bra underneath she unfastened herself and let hang over her shoulders. Tyreen leaned back, all scarred and marked and naked except for the pressure bandage and her striker.

They still bathed together if they had the chance. Her body was nothing new or strange to him. Sharing his one tatty button down with her, well, he’d never done that before. The thing hung on her like a nightgown.

He’d bled on it a little a couple of towns and a rough night ago. 

Straightening the placket out for her, he made himself remember the spots so he knew which ones were his.

Tyreen pursed her lips and rumpled the thing back up. She tapped the bottle of disinfectant.

“You don’t have to…” Troy muttered.

She tapped it again. He pulled off his glove and leaned down so she didn’t have to reach. Then she doused him like she was trying to put out a campfire. It burned like hell on the scratches and bites, but Troy smiled over his own pain.

There wasn’t anything left to do with the med kit. He moved to pack it up.

Forget his daydream of keeping a pretty, wounded bandit. This whole thing, this part where they worked their way into the place they’d chattered about for so long, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t. Adventures weren’t ever easy the whole way through. But he and Tyreen should have been teasing each other about the battle they’d seen through. They should have been carrying on about dinner the next town over, fighting about something stupid so they could tussel and make up. They should have been anything else.

Instead he had bits of his hair gummed together with his sister’s snot. 

Sighing, Troy dug his ECHO unit out of his cargo pants.

The case crumbled in his hand. He must have fallen on it when he dived out of the SAT-V. Well, that was why they had cases. He shook the pieces off and hit start.

Nothing happened.

He smacked it on his thigh and tried again.

Still nothing. Sand and suspect chips of metal toppled out as he tried again.

The uplink component rattled in the back. He could fix that. He had a pliers in his cargo pants to do it. It was a twist here, a gentle flex there. The screen finally lit.

It told him ‘WELCOME’ and then nothing. 

He had no way to call out. All of the money was gone besides.

Tyreen hummed at him from the brush, the first sound she’d made in a while. He was honestly glad to hear it, however long it had been. He hadn’t been keeping track of her or himself or anything really. It had been him and the ECHO unit. Now the storm was starting to settle, clouds towards the east thinning out to show threads of yellow sky headed their way.

Troy moved to sit beside her again as he told her, “My ECHO’s dead.” 

“You gotta be kidding me,” Tyreen groaned.

“I’m not. I’m sorry.”

“Why not? Why aren’t you kidding?” Her breath caught. She added, “It hurts.”

“It’s gonna hurt for a while, Ty. You gotta…” He trailed off. The words had been so clear in his mouth:  _ you gotta tough it out _ . Like Dad had always insisted when she was hurt, when Troy himself was fading away.

It was something they each expected to hear. It was also, listening to it now from the vantage of the burned out road, surrounded by death and the wreck of his sister’s bloody clothes, the cruelest thing he could think of to say.

Tyreen figured it was coming. She had that sad sort of recognition on her face.

Troy reached out. He took her blank hand in his. She could still feed him with that one, but there wasn’t any slippery ease to it, there wasn’t the bite of the hunger in his body. It was almost like two ordinary people touching.

“You gotta trust me. I’ll make it OK,” said Troy. “I promise.”

If she didn’t acknowledge that part, he wasn’t sure he expected her to. A promise might have been a promise, but it could only mean so much to someone in her state. It definitely didn’t do her any good in that exact moment. But then she tried to laugh. It turned into a ragged, tired cough. “Who cares about calling from the fucking ECHO? Nobody saves anybody out here anyway.” 

“I dunno. Maybe I was gonna trade them me for a ride. Maybe it woulda kinda worked.” He put a light twist to the words.

Tyreen got quiet again for a while, thinking beside him or drifting off to sleep. He was reaching to give her a shake when she squeezed him and she said, “No.” And instead, she shook him. “Mine’s gone too, right?”

“Yeah. It’s gone,” said Troy. So were all of their pictures that proved they’d made it to Pandora, the books they’d chosen to steal. So were their songs. The one she’d played for him earlier had already washed out of his memories.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 7/28/2020.


	5. Chapter 5

The dark desert whipped around him.

It had taken hours to get the bandit SAT-V started. Now Troy drove like his sister did, without using the brakes. He figured that would burn less fuel. They only had so much of that even after he’d siphoned the remains of the other vehicles dry. He still tasted grungy engine innards when he breathed out, but he’d been too twisted up inside to try eating anything to dull the fumes between his teeth. Now the thought turned his stomach more than the chemicals.

This SAT-V shook when he pressed the accelerator, shook like it wanted to throw him and his sister into the dirt.

Elpis swung across the remains of the road.

He could have driven back the way they’d come, but there wasn’t much of a doctor in the settlement behind them, just an old woman who’d paid him to fuck her on a broken exam table. He didn’t know if the bandits they’d killed had been the last of their lot, or if more were already on their tail. He didn’t know if anybody else came this way, or even what the gang called themselves. Troy kept checking for them in the rearview anyway. 

He had no GPS or voice transmission access without an ECHO. His map was so out-of-date it didn’t show the town they’d left. The town they headed for might be years gone. There wasn’t any way to know what people had settled along the remains of the road in the intervening years, let alone how many of them survived.

He watched for lights and he listened. The only sounds besides the rattle of his thoughts were the engine and the busted asphalt hissing beneath them. No cars, no howls, no voices, no insect-riddled chemical lamps fuming in the cliffs.

Troy glanced at the passenger seat. Tyreen lay there, cocooned in his desert cloak. Her shoulders bobbed as they passed over a crevasse in the paving. 

_ I know it hurts  _ he wanted to say. She’d taken a swat at him the last time though. She might actually be asleep now besides. That, or… 

He also wanted to be able to rest his hand on her. But he had to drive. He had to hold himself to that, suspended in his doubts.

What if they should have gone back?

What if she was dead and he’d have no way to know until she slumped cold into his arms at the next stop?

Whatever happened next, he had at least sort of given her what she’d asked for:  _ I don’t wanna die running. _

If she died, she would die of her wound. That wouldn’t be on her back. She wouldn’t come off a coward to whoever found her body, if that was anyone at all. 

Troy would dig her grave big enough for both of them. When he got tired for the last time, he’d curl up beside her and go to sleep. It’d be like in the tent, like when they were kids. She’d feel cool and sweet against the warm soil as he drifted off. It wouldn’t be a bad way to go. Disappointing, maybe, considering what they’d set out to do: tell their own story. Tyreen, she’d at least wanted to crash down in flames if things came to that. She’d said so at least once when she was drunk.

Sleep sounded so nice though. 

Troy rolled his shoulder, tried to ignore that his hand was getting numb, that the space behind his eyes felt like it was filled with pot smoke. If she asked, he’d tell her— they weren’t running. They were driving through the squirming nothing of Pandora for their own reasons, just like everybody else who happened to have a set of wheels that night. They weren’t running. No one was dying. 

They’d travelled by moonlight for a while before, not long after they’d arrived. That was how people were supposed to deal with deserts. All the best books said so. Sleeping during the heat of the day turned out to be almost impossible for either of them. Besides, Troy got more customers at night. Maybe he looked better by acetylene miner’s lanterns. He hadn’t exactly asked anybody. 

Tyreen tried to come with him one night after a trick who’d busted his lip. “We’ll say I’m your bodyguard. It’ll be weird and people’ll remember.” Troy did his best to explain to her that it took at least two people to bodyguard  _ right  _ and that hookers didn’t have them except in the shining depths of places like Promethea. She’d agreed to dredge for work outside of the local garage and then showed up beside him in the bar as if the discussion had never happened.

Like he could’ve turned her away. The conversation had been trash and then there he was, laughing with her over cheap, musky moonshine. The guy who made the pass at him— no, them —felt like an intrusion. “Yeah, I’m here for that ink and her babyface.” (Tyreen had snickered.) “How much for the both of you?” 

When they told him  _ cent  _ like in Nabokov, he got what they were on about. He laughed.

They went back to his fleabox and his passed out roommate. Tyreen stripped down to her panties as the radio spun on. Troy got a pretty good blowjob for round one. It might have been better without his sister nibbling through the nighttime insects hardly an arm’s length away. The guy kissed him with sperm all over his mouth still and he tried to shake Tyreen out of her dance. She dodged him only to place herself on Troy’s still-wet lap. The guy said, “Yeah, you hold her up for me. This’ll be fun.”

Troy did what he was told. He held his sister.

She reached behind herself. Her babyface had been all red from the moonshine still. Troy had felt her shake like something cold had shot up her spine. He’d almost wondered if the guy had gone and done it, gotten past her phaseleech with the sheer force of his boozed-up will.

A look of pure pleasure consumed Tyreen though. She licked her teeth.

The guy didn’t even scream. He just  _ wasn’t _ at a certain point and Tyreen had her arms around a statue.

She didn’t look disappointed after, only the kind of stoic she’d used to turn when Dad yelled at them. She leaned in, draped herself around Troy instead; said, “Oh shit…” as he was still trying to take in the fact she’d killed a man.

They’d taken their  _ cent  _ and the john’s SAT-V and they’d left. 

After a whole day of travelling, their fuel gave out a few towns away. They tried to sleep on the seats, getting nibbled on by moth-things. After that, “So, I guess we’re doing this backwards and getting sunburned all to hell? You drive if I’m tired, I guess.” She’d smiled when she told him. There had been no asking about it. 

Now, Tyreen’s hands were a couple of shades darker than his. Or had they always been that way? Was it all a matter of her brown skin against the white cloak? Why hadn’t he noticed before?

He wanted so badly to touch her.

Troy turned his attention back to the bright streaks leading along what was left of the road. Paint, he realized. Someone really had meant for this to be a highway. It had to lead someplace with a purpose. That place might never have been finished or even real, but someone held it in their mind once… 

He knew. Retracing their path had never been an option, same as wandering back into their father’s arms.

Troy’s grip loosened and his fingers slid over the wheel, settling into a different spot in the grimy leather. Just like the rest of him against the universe.

It all felt awfully small down there on Pandora, Tyreen motionless beside him on this forgotten stretch of road his whole world. He resettled himself in the seat and tapped the gas pedal. The bandit SAT-V bit forwards. 

Space around them opened up. The bluffs had felt like they might go on for another dozen miles, somewhere into the night. Pandora was never exactly flat— strange crags of stone or old mining facilities jolted out of the ground. It looked torn up, moreso after dark. 

There had been walls around this tract of pavement, and then this expanse as wide as he could see by the blue glisten of things and the glare of the headlights. The desert spread itself open. It hit him like a fistful of stars.

As he circled off of the road, he did it for his own sake, coming to a stop at the base of a stone jag. 

The sudden stillness left a hum rising in his ears. It took him some long while to hear the wind again. Then there really wasn’t much else. There wasn’t a sound from his sister.

He reached out and laid his hand on hers. 

Her fingers flexed weakly beneath his. 

“Hey. I’m gonna check on some stuff and then we’re gonna walk you around. I’ll be right back.”

Tyreen sighed. “My stomach hurts.”

“I know.” He gave her a squeeze and he climbed out of the SAT-V. His legs wobbled beneath him as he slid into a deep autonomic stretch. Every muscle in his body twinged with how much he longed to flex and reach and be. Some of the movements hurt, and a dreamy buzz sounded in the back of his head once he’d finished. It felt good and that was all the more reason to try and ignore it. He knew what it meant after all.

He made his way up the stones. Troy was decent enough at climbing over weird marks in the land or rubble or both. As long as he didn’t find himself confronted with a sheer cliff face, Pandora didn’t offer much of a challenge compared to the ruins where he’d grown up. He wasn’t fighting his way up spires of smooth metal or biting bone, just rock.

The land still carried haze from the dust storm. It threw the distance estimation in his binoculars off. He watched all the way down the road, searching for lights or buildings or movement. If that was five or ten miles he could see across the night and mist, he didn’t even find any likely looking crags where settlers might have hidden themselves. 

Free of the crease through the bluffs, the stones kept to themselves in low clusters and other jags, pebbled dunes drifting between. Gravel flats rose on the East. He thought he spied a lamppost there, but drawing the lenses in closer it was only the remains of a tree and not a living one at that. Some of the stones though, they looked like they’d been brought together not by weather, but by crudely-stacked will.

That gave him an idea.

Troy slid back down, scraping his boots and landing with a thud. “Quiet night,” he said.

Tyreen peered at him. 

“Lots of stars.”

She nodded. She didn’t look up to see. He’d been hoping she’d look up.

Still, he bent and he gingerly slid her out of the car. It wasn’t good for her to move too much, but then again, it was worse for her not to move at all, especially if she was stuck sitting up in the passenger seat while he drove.

Tyreen clung to the cloak, letting Troy hold her more or less on her feet, though she didn’t rest much of her weight on her boots. Troy walked her over his own footprints and back. It wasn’t more than a few yards, but her armpits were all wet by the time they headed back to the SAT-V. 

“You need help going to the bathroom?” Troy asked. 

His sister shifted uncomfortably inside of the cloak. Eventually, she shook her head. “My ass is cold. Can I have a pair of your shorts?” she murmured. “You said my stuff’s gone, right?”

“You can have a pair of my shorts,” Troy replied. After, he stretched her out on the emergency blanket and raided his pack. He picked the soft pair with hearts and undid her boots so he could get them onto her. The waist fit alright, but they hung low over her crotch. Once he got her redressed, he lifted her feet onto the pack, letting her rest there while he went over the SAT-V, tightening ties and checking the engine. “So, I think I can get you dinner. It’s not gonna be great is all.”

“Don’t know if I can eat,” said Tyreen.

That got him peering around the SAT-V. Tyreen was either ravenous or pretending not to be. She was never full. That was part of her, part of the very act of being the person he called Ty and was constantly shoving out of his bed in the morning, something he half-suspected might be her trying to leech him in her sleep  _ because she was hungry _ .

He smiled her way despite his concern. “We’ll try. Doubt I’ll waste any ammo and if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out.”

She didn’t answer. He got his pistol out just in case and put it in the cup holder. There wasn’t really anything left to worry about on the car, except for the stability of her seat before he lifted her in and she balled herself up in his cloak.

They started off. Troy pulled away from the road as the gravel flats panned out beside them. Low, even places with clusters of stone meant spiderants. Finding a colony presented plenty of risk, but it was a risk to be on the road at all so far between outposts. It was a risk to be on Pandora and not question this fact.

Troy tapped the gas, making the engine pulse. That would draw up workers and sentries, curious small parts of any colony. The gravel pinged and rattled around them as he turned. If he was going to go to the trouble, he wanted the spiderants to believe he was wounded and stumbling; a rakkhive or another creature they’d never met who was maybe full of tasty guts.

Tyreen flinched as gravel tricked between the screens on the SAT-V. She flipped her shields on and curled back into her place beside him.

It warmed him to see her moving on her own even though a chill had wandered into the air by then. It must have been close to midnight, the two of them spinning below the stars, him thinking— well, no matter how he messed with their car, they  _ were _ wandering, weren’t they? Or they would be, down and out in the dregs of the galaxy. For now, they were confined by needs so simple even Mama and Dad had been able to meet them on a dead world. How far they hadn’t come, stealing across the sand.

All these damn years of knowing his mind veered into strange places when he was the other kind of hungry, Troy still let it happen as he curved around a runnel of dark stones and watched the reflective paint along the road wink back into view. It was more obvious from this vantage that he’d chosen a good spot. The nest was old and crumbling, but there was one and what might have been another still further south. The second was all but on the road, so some kind of recent, at least for a planet whose years counted a human childhood.

On his second turn between the two, a shadow crept across his headlights, then another. There were two at least, workers by the glimpse he caught of their shape. Taking either would draw the entire nest out, but if he got both on one run, that would buy him some time before that happened. They were pretty far apart was all. One larger. Hopefully, it hadn’t grown wings. Animals mutated so quickly on this planet. 

He pulled out, far into the glinting gravel, twisted the SAT-V, and he floored it. He didn’t want to hit the spiderants full-on. A graze would do it. The smaller one noticed him and reared at the engine sound approaching. It snagged under the wheel with a wet thump and he had no doubt it was dead given the slimy puddle it left in the rearview. The second charged. He clipped it hard. As they skidded to a stop, he heard it buzzing to itself as it tried to live.

Perfect.

Troy backed up, coming as close to reaching distance from the passenger seat as he could. He leapt from the SAT-V and shoved the struggling thing closer. It hissed at him. He noticed as it scraped along that it had two growths like goat horns starting on its head. Speaking of mutations.

Tyreen watched him from where she lay.

“I know it’s gross, but you gotta eat,” he told her.

His sister nodded. She tried to reach out, but that ended in a wince.

Troy maneuvered his way between her and the spideant. One of the claws had fractured and the joint above it bent backwards. He smashed that against the car. The thing tried to thrash as he stripped off its armor. Underneath was spongy, undifferentiated matter. He wouldn’t have even called it flesh. It smelled wet and vegetal, not altogether unpleasant. 

Tyreen reached out, a dim neon light rising along her fingers. Her marked hand fell into place.

The spiderant trembled. It made no more sound than the rattle of its broken body. Lines of sandy darkness crept down its belly. Tyreen’s jaw worked as though she had something in her mouth, though a certain grace slipped through her frame otherwise, a hell of a thing to see when her mouth snapped open and all of a sudden and she was drooling as her tongue slid over her lips. “She’s got eggs,” she said. “They’re not fertilized, but they’re ripe.”

Troy nodded. “Tastes OK?”

“Tastes good.” She squeezed. Violet light cracked across the spiderant and it shed a single, pearly gob from its backend before the glow went out on a slow, electric crackle.

Troy bent and plucked up the egg. He offered it to Tyreen, whose touch turned it to stone. He then scrubbed his hand on his cargo pants. Tyreen wiped hers on the side of the SAT-V. 

The way back to the nests ran thick with rustles now. A sense of eyes.

They had the whole colony’s attention.

Troy climbed back into the SAT-V and they sped off, careening south once more.

On a not too distant rise of the road, he pulled over and stopped again.

He and his sister were both breathing heavy, as if they’d fled on foot. He held his hand out to her. “I need some too. Please don’t be mad.”

Tyreen made no move to touch him. Her eyes shone as she panted.

Troy swiped the spit from her chin with the corner of his empty sleeve. It left them awful close, doing that.

Now, she took his hand in hers. The solidity that welled in his bones tasted so strongly of perfume and rot he swore he smelled a funeral for the rest of the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 7/28/2020.


	6. Chapter 6

The SAT-V started burning oil a few hours after dawn. Night insects still rattled in the shadows. Heat had only just started to seep off of the sunlight, but there was still heat. Another long, hot day loomed.

Troy waited for the engine to cool. He managed to pry his way down to the fuel lines. The whole space under the hood was full of black gunk. He tried clearing it by dusting the top layer with sand, waiting again for it to set, and spooning the muck out with the trowel. He did this three times before he noticed the puddle of fuel spreading beneath the undercarriage.

Bullet holes would do that.

Troy looked at the ratchet in his hand. In the back of his mind, he saw himself throwing it. That was what guys in adventure stories did when their equipment broke down. That had happened at least twice in the average twenty-second century pirate novel. 

Troy put the ratchet back in its box, then calmly flung the rest of their gear out of the back before coming around the passenger side.

Tyreen slumped against the door, cloak pulled over her as a sunshade. 

He lifted the corner close to her face. 

She peered out at him. “Car’s dead?” 

“Yeah.”

“Huh. Guess that’s what stinks.”

He’d imagined she’d scream at him, pound her fists on him and call him a dumbfuck. Wasn’t fixing shit his job? Why’d she even bring him along? And all the other cutting words she could have used to share her anger with him until she was tired and whimpering and he ended up being the one to apologize.

She lay there, eyes on him, attention distant. She was thinking about something else, probably the pain lingering in her insides.

“C’mon,” Troy tried. “Can’t stay here.”

Tyreen didn’t acknowledge that she’d heard him.

Troy dropped the corner of the cloak. What was he supposed to say to her? Every line of comfort he remembered from those same damn pirate novels felt some shade of unkind, at least hollow, now that he stood in the desert with his sister cringing at his side when her body made her sigh. 

So, Troy said nothing. He opened the door slowly and set about working his arm underneath hers. He figured he could get a hold of her if he leaned in right.

All at once, Tyreen locked her arms around his neck, tight enough she shook with the tension in her grip.

“Hey, it’s...”

“Carry me,” she said.

Troy bit back a sigh. “You walked OK last night, you know.”

“My legs hurt.”

“That’s not…” The sigh bled through after all. Troy slid his hand down her back, right under her ass, and he pulled when he straightened himself. 

The cloak snagged on every corner. He couldn’t imagine her squirming herself into place did much for her injury besides. But her hood and then her cheek rested on his shoulder. Troy tipped his head against her and did his best to walk. 

He needed to get her someplace shady and out of blast range. That would have been easier back where the bluffs lined the road. The place where the SAT-V had died was craggy, treacherous and low. The gravel felt unsettled in the gaps between the remaining asphalt. It was frankly the kind of place he would have expected a skag burrow lurking in the stones. He listened hard as he could as he trudged. He should have taken his pistol, but then he would have had to drop Tyreen to shoot. Assuming she would have let him. She clasped one hand in the other, her grasp was sweaty and slipping but determined nonetheless.

He came around to a rusty red outcropping, another one of the jags that rose from the ground like splinters of bone. Its bed lay somewhat lower than the plane, a cluster of succulents and brush growing there runoff would gather.

“Here’s not so bad,” he said, giving Tyreen a jostle to encourage her to let go.

She turned her head, inspecting the spot and nodding. Together, they lowered her into the deepest part of the shade, half-sitting and half on her side. She made a mew of distress and reached for her belly, but pulled her hand away, flexing her fingers instead, as though she was unhappy with how she’d wrung them out.

Troy gave her a moment, then went to explain he was headed back for their stuff. When he held his hand up, a gob of dark blood marked the center. The next heartbeat he felt in the back of his throat.

Troy ripped the cloak off of Tyreen. She squeaked. One of her fists hit him on the side as he realized there wasn’t a fresh mark on the shirt. A clot oozed off of her knee though.

Tyreen stared at him. She cracked a smile, then stabbed a finger his way and finally began to laugh despite the wince flickering across her expression. “Fucking seriously?”

“Fucking yes!” Troy snapped. “What is this!?”

“Umm, I’m a girl. Girls get periods.” She quirked an eyebrow at him between snickers.

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“I was  _ gonna _ . So hey, when you get back, can I have another pair of your shorts or something, ‘cause I got a sneaking suspicion I’m gonna be bleeding outta my snatch for the next few days.”

“Dammit, Ty! It’s...” He shook his head, then scrubbed his palm on his forearm until the dust and the blood sloughed off. 

Tyreen pushed her face up at him. Doing it made her grit her teeth. “All over everything like when we were kids?”

In the end, Troy swept his hand over his face. The sheer terror left him weirdly empty now that it had gone, empty and hot. “Are you OK? There’s a lot.”

“I got a bullet in me, so no. I’m kinda not OK. I’m also late if that’s what you’re asking. Late usually means bloodsplosion.”

“You always mean bloodsplosion,” he needled. The smile he put on after was for her and not really quite his own.

“Thanks.”

“I’m gonna go get our stuff. Then maybe we can clean some of this off.” He flicked his hand towards the splotch down the middle of the cloak.

Tyreen shrugged.

He shrugged too and turned to leave. An impulsive wriggle of an idea snuck up on him through the first few steps. “I’m glad you’re not pregnant or shitting ant eggs, ‘cause sometimes I wonder about you.” Troy ran as soon as he’d gotten that out. Tyreen still managed to nail him in the back with a rock.

He figured if that was what it took to keep her sparking beside him, he’d go ahead and tease her. It was going to be tricky, moving forward with that, but the same went for the next few minutes, next few hours, next few drifts across the desert.

Troy cracked his back and ran to the SAT-V. He grabbed everything they had left: his pack and the bindle he’d made for the remaining supplies and two jugs of water. He wasn’t making more than one trip, he’d decided. Not when there was so much that had to be decided soon and besides, he didn’t want to leave Tyreen alone, smelling of blood. True, she could leech anything or anyone that went for her.

Or could she? She’d turned out some kind of vulnerable after all. They were going to have to test this, work out new tactics for their inevitable repeat performances. In the meantime, there Troy was, slumping back in the shade and pressing another pair of shorts into her hands.

“I had a cup in my stuff. I bet you didn’t look for it,” said Tyreen.

“Wasn’t anything to look through,” Troy replied. “I’ll work extra next town over. We’ll get you two and one goes in my bag.”

“Seriously?” She snorted at him. “A john or a jane finds that, they’re gonna tease the hell outta you.”

“Then I’ll tell them why I don’t care. I’ll tell them  _ exactly  _ why.” He gestured for Tyreen to turn onto her back.

Which she did, once he also placed his hand on her hip, anyway. “Nah. You wouldn’t,” she said with certainty.

Troy left her hanging as far as an answer went. He also tried not to look as he was undressing her. A body was a body and he’d seen hers from the angle of a surgeon, but kneeling in the space between her knees he could see the rivulets of damp floss creeping over the crease of her thighs. There was something disconcerting about knowing exactly where his sister’s thatch ended.

Tyreen nudged him on the shoulder with her foot. “Hey, we shower together.” He’d pointed this out to himself earlier and now she had to harp on it too. “What’s with the face?”

“There’s blood.” Troy pointed out. 

“Like you had up to your elbows literally yesterday.”

“That didn’t come out of your pussy.”

The heat of the morning went solid and still. Tyreen’s toes squirmed in his peripheral vision. She reached down and stuck her fingers between her lips, spreading herself. “A hole’s a hole. Since when do you say pussy?”

“Since Eunomian girls don’t like the word cunt. Or asshole.”

“Well, that’s stupid.”

Troy nodded. He also whipped open one of his spare toilet paper rations and shoved this into Tyreen’s hand, the one that wasn’t currently showing her off. “Oh, and your asshole’s covered in gore too.”

“Nice.” She went about dabbing herself off, trying not to bend her back as she worked. Troy could have offered to put gloves on and do it for her, but it had been strange enough the day before, sliding into and out of her skin. He could still feel the singed pucker of her muscles sucking softly on his fingertip. Besides, she did alright by herself, then wadded the bloody shorts up inside of the clean ones and asked for soap. 

While Troy had her half undressed, he pushed the shirt up and checked her bandage. It was still clean and snug. As she finished scrubbing her hands, he asked, “Thirty minute break?” 

“Yeah,” she yawned, but she might have been making a point more than actually being tired at him, the way she kicked back against the cloak, trying to make it look like she was comfortable, at least lying someplace that wasn’t all rocks and sand and dead leaves.

Troy nodded. He hadn’t eaten any food since the last of the night stops. That had been a protein bar crammed into his mouth without tasting. He wasn’t up for repeating that.

He went through his MREs, searching for the most beat up bag so he could use that up first. The one he chose read “Chicken Loaf”. He pulled it open with his teeth, stowed the toilet paper for later, found the ‘Main Dish’ and set that in the sun to warm up while he unpacked the rest. The main dish was supposed to be hot, but most of the kits on Pandora arrived with their chemical heaters mysteriously missing.

He started with the coffee. He always got creamer up his nose when he opened those packets. Always. Calories were calories though. That, and he was looking forward to said coffee, he realized.

The other plasticized pouches whistled as he popped their seals. He only noticed because he had to open them so close to his face. There were big, salty wheat crackers (Vladoff-style, he’d gleaned), a brick of dingy cherries, a packet of peanut butter and a fruit and nut cake so full of shortening it melted settling into its space on his metal tray. He was glad to find the peanut butter. The stuff in the MREs was so tangy and smooth. He’d had a spoonful out of a jar in a trick’s apartment once and he hadn’t cared for it as much. Then again, it might have been rancid. 

Troy still didn’t quite understand  _ liking  _ food. Liquor, yes, but liquor was recreational. Back on Nekrotafeyo, his family had eaten what they had: greenhouse plums or dusty protein rations or stringy hunks of the wildlife. This was all done out of need, and opinions on taste weren’t appreciated. He’d gone out of his way not to form any.

So far, he tended to care more about texture than flavor, hence his interest in the peanut butter and the cake. The chicken loaf disappointed him. It was unpleasantly minced and woody-tasting. Not bad on the crackers though— that gave it some crunch and made a lot of crumbs.

He was dusting them off when Tyreen rolled over, resting her head on his leg. She gave the cherries an experimental poke. “Can I have some? They smell good,” she said.

“You don’t get anything in your mouth until we know you’re not leaking.”

The side-eye she gave him.

“Until we know your  _ bullet wound _ ’ _ s _ not leaking. It’s gonna be a while yet. Next time I find a pack. OK?” Troy said that mildly, even though odds were, she’d throw the cherries up once they tried. There was still always that hope that one day they’d find someone else she could touch. One day they’d find something she could eat like an ordinary person so she wasn’t stuck on soda and clear liquor and that Maliwan cinder toffee that stuck to her teeth.

Tyreen twisted herself to look up at him as he ate the cherries himself, then the cake, which required the spoon by the time he got to it, and finally the entire packet of peanut butter, squished straight into his mouth. As he finished, she shifted once more, pressing her ear to his belly. She seemed to be listening to his insides.

He probably should have done the same for her, made sure there was still some kind of movement in her innards. But would it have made that much difference in her case? Nothing inside of her worked quite right, not her intestines, not her heart (it was nervy as her spine) and apparently not her uterus. "You hungry?” He asked as he moved on to finish the coffee.

“I’m thirsty and it hurts,” said Tyreen. 

“I know. It’ll stop soon. You get thirsty enough and you can’t feel it anymore,” Troy lied a little about her wanting water. She probably knew better anyway. He scritched his hand along her neck. A dot of peanut butter he’d missed on his little finger smeared along her skin. “So.”

The word rested between them, immense.

“So what?” Tyreen asked. 

“We should get someplace it’s safe and we can see the road. Besides, maybe we lucked out and there’s some crazy, old miner over the next hill.”

“Maybe he just croaked and we can take his shit. Or I can, you know, fix that.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” It got Troy somewhere in his sense of himself, hearing her say she’d fix anything that particular way of hers. People who tried to mess with them were one thing, the bandits who’d shot her another, the accident with the man their SAT-V once belonged to, well, an accident. Mostly.

He spit on his fingers and tried to wipe the peanut butter off of her.

He’d known she was like this from when they were little. All of the philosophy lessons they’d sat through, the old lectures about will to power and the condemnation that was freedom made no difference to Tyreen’s body. What choice had she ever had than to be a bit bloodthirsty and read all of the trashy pirate novels she could find?

He should be happy to watch her blossoming in a place more suited to her kind. Maybe that was the heart of the problem, the part of him that shrank away still. He was watching her suffer instead. 

Troy said, “If you get up, I’ll chart us a course, captain.”

For another while there was no answer. Tyreen stayed right where she was, shifting in these subtle ways where he could tell she wasn’t asleep. When she plucked herself off of him, it was on her own terms.

Troy grabbed his binoculars. The jag where they’d taken shelter rested at a low enough angle he could walk up it, more or less. The day ran bright white around him, distance hazy with dust and light. Using the binoculars in full sun made his eyes water.

A stretch of rocky hardpan raced along south as far as he could see. There was one shimmer of stone, far off on the edge of what he could make out. The binoculars still couldn’t tell him how far with the refraction index jumping all over the place as he tried to tweak the zoom. The rocks were pocked and welted, but not in the sickly way varkids came from. It looked, and he hoped he was right, that the dark spots he saw were wind-cut cliff faces. 

He searched once more, for a light, for a car, for a windmill, for anyone else.

Then he climbed back down. “Looks like there’s an OK place down the road. I can see it from here, so it’s not that far. And before you complain...” He bent and picked up the ratchet set. “The car hasn’t exploded yet. Let me see what I can rig up.”

Tyreen lifted her arms over her head like she was trying to stretch. “Yeah? Have fun with that. Might go for a jog here when I’m done being half dead.”

“Right. Yell if you need me. Try to lie on your side in case you puke again.”

She nodded, though the idea clearly didn’t impress her.

It still sucked all to hell, leaving her there. But unless a cadre of vault hunters or some well-meaning missionary came around the corner in the next hour, Troy didn’t see a way past it. He started to walk. He didn’t get five paces before there was a voice behind him.

“Hey, Troy.”

“Hey, yeah?” He stopped, twisting around in the sunlight and shielding his eyes.

Tyreen had gotten onto her side, like he’d asked. “Can we find something for me to do next town? Like a regular thing?”

“Sure. If you want.” She wasn’t looking his way, but he put a soft expression on for her anyway. “Kinda like having a pretty, little princess to come home to, but I’ll learn.” She really couldn’t have given him a better in to keep up with the teasing.

“You’re just saying that ‘cause you like all those dumb medieval romances with the thees and the thous and the chastity.” Tyreen pressed her soap-stained finger to her mouth. “Oh, I guess you missed that last part.”

“Chastity’s even dumber than pirate yarns.” Having said as much, he turned to leave her. Troy DeLeon said no more, but there were still words on the end, tracing the broken edge of the old highway.

But when she saw her prayers not prevail,

She back-returned with some labour lost;

And in the way as she did weep and wail,

A knight her met in mighty arms embossed,

Yet knight was not for all his bragging boast,

But subtle Archimag, that Una sought

By trains into new troubles to have tossed:

Of that old woman tidings he besought,

If that of such a Lady she could tell him aught.

And then, his sister laughing away in the shade. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You weren’t expecting Edmund Spenser in a Borderlands fic? Surprise! The modernization presented is probably not what the author intended, but is a scrubby solution to make the passage easy to read.
> 
> MRE info brought to you by Steve1989MREInfo. Goodness, I hope he doesn’t read this.
> 
> Updated 7/28/2020.


	7. Chapter 7

Troy made a travois out of the SAT-V’s roll bars and the passenger seat. It weighed almost as much as his sister, but he wouldn’t make her walk and he couldn’t carry her much further than he already had. He lashed the small end to his waist, threw the pack and bindle over his shoulder, and tied the remains of Tyreen’s cloak around his shoulders as a hood. She was going to have to deal with the water on her lap given an off chance he needed the pistol once again crammed in his waistband. He began to trudge.

He’d spent a lot of the morning tearing the remains of the SAT-V apart and putting them back together. By the time he set out, Pandoran midday had settled and the sky was so bright it bled out white. The travois scraped across the gravel. The things were meant for snow or forest floor, not desert.

He was still some kind of glad he’d known how to make one. The alternative of dragging Tyreen on an emergency blanket would have scratched her all to hell and ruined the blanket. This way, she rested behind him, though the whine of the roll bar on the hardpan probably kept her from sleeping.

Troy said nothing. He was trying to keep his mouth wet. The ambient noises came down to rattles and footfalls and sometimes a hiss of wind. He kept yanking the hood lower, trying to stave off going sunblind. The mask helped some, but the lenses fogged over with sweat every handful of minutes and the gummed up filter made it so hard to breathe that he started to feel the weight of the travois clasped like a fist around his spine.

Unwilling to speak or to rest, Troy DeLeon washed up in his thoughts once more. He hated it: the soft terror, the sheer wrongness of his creeping solitude. He wanted to be with people, with his sister, with somebody, anybody. He would have settled for his damn  _ father _ .

Troy paused to scrub his face sooner than he’d figured he would. His tongue stuck to the backs of his teeth and his back popped and  _ fuck everything  _ he was thirsty. He made himself picture taking the pump in the bathhouse apart piece by piece since that would at least get his mind off of the heat.

The pump though made him think of the place he’d left. Tyreen refused to call it ‘home’ and he had no reason to argue with her. ‘Home’ was an uncanny, restless conceit to him. Places were places and people were people, all temporary stations in their travels by the virtue of them travelling at all.

Tyreen was not ‘home’. She was his sister. He didn’t want her to be anything else. But there she was, stuck having to open up the glossy nothingness of being in his body just to keep him around. If he talked like she ruled him sometimes, he wanted her to think about him like he was her clever sorcerer even though he was only her brother. He couldn’t bring her dragon heads, but he could make sure she got them herself. 

What she did for him was too much to expect from anybody. Mama and Dad had never said so, but they gave him books that spelled it out and he  _ knew _ , he  _ still knew _ he was wretched and he’d never be a knight or even a very good brother. Part of him still considered it would be a kindness to Tyreen if he could bring himself to slit his throat right there. 

They’d still be back with Dad if he hadn’t at least showed a small capacity for his own magic. But that… 

The next step Troy took lasted strangely longer than the others, not quite in hesitation. His body slowed down as the question lit on his nerves.

Would it really be the worst thing between them if he called the sense of her sleeping hungrily against his back ‘home’? That was tempting. Again, he really didn’t want to die, not over that or any of his personal sad sack ethics.

They were brother and sister and everything and nothing.

He needed to walk. He needed to put himself somewhere else in his mind and do it with purpose. With nothing much in his way, he let his eyes drift closed and he remembered the bath house on Nekrotafeyo. 

Dad had cobbled it together from fifteen or sixteen different ruins, or so he’d always told them. He’d done it before finishing a proper bedroom. He and Mama had needed water and Mama liked to bathe. “Happy wife, happy life,” Dad would say about that and all kinds of other things; things that happened even after Mama died and so when he caught himself, he’d be angry for the rest of the day.

Dad had tried to make the bathhouse look Roman, but all he’d had to work with was Eridian wreckage. The pillars were luminous pylons and the tub part of a metal ceiling and the pump sometimes prone to spit out error messages in a dead language. Troy could hear himself, maybe three years old, laughing about that while Dad crammed a screwdriver into his hand and said that if  _ Typhon DeLeon’s only begotten son _ was going to be that way, he could help. What Troy didn’t remember was how things had gone after, if he’d been happy or made Dad happy. He knew Mama kissed his head later that night. They’d probably had story time. They usually did, even when things were starting to unravel those last few months.

Mama had always kissed their heads. Because he and Ty were smaller than her? Was it a custom where she’d come from? Didn’t she want to see their faces when she did it? And if it was that last one, did Troy blame her?

The story about them, him and Tyreen, started out with him understanding from that same fragile three that the two of them have been conceived in the bathhouse. They had always known, but not the same blunt way they knew they’d been born there.

Mama would tell that story, but only when it was her and Tyreen and Troy. They’d been weeks early. The night they happened, Mama couldn’t sleep. She was “Trying to keep you two in my tummy. You were so small.” She’d flick Troy on the end of the nose when she said that, then talk about how the water had been so nice and cool. She’d fallen asleep with her head tucked under her arms.

Like swans slept. He could picture it out there in the heat, her inky hair trailing down her chest and into the water; the shadow of her elbow hiding her face. 

“When I woke up, it was because you insisted on coming out. I felt this little snap...” She’d broken her tailbone pushing. “And there were your little feet, and your knees and then  _ your _ little head.” She used a very specific  _ your  _ for the last one, musical and meaning Tyreen. “Because you were like this.” She’d point to the Pisces fish in the zodiac Dad had etched along the wall. “...when you popped out. I thought I’d had fish instead of babies.”

Besides, they’d been blue and she’d hemorrhaged and she didn’t know where she was for the first hour after they were born because she was in so much pain. Dad had yelled all of that at them once after they’d snuck out to go exploring. Tyreen had gotten sour about it. “Mom said we just came out. She  _ lied  _ to us. Why’d she do that?”

But before that, before Mama died, the bathhouse had been a happy place. He’d played navy or mermaids with Ty. Mama and Dad would cuddle if they got in together and that was comforting to see on some spiritual level.

Troy had even liked going there when he was sick, so much as he liked anything when that happened. Mama would take him and make the water hot if he couldn’t keep warm. He’d drift beside her, lost in her wet skin smell. She’d tell him he was a good baby, even up to the point where he was six or seven and definitely not a baby in his own childish mind. He’d wonder if dying felt like slipping into the water but never coming up. Mama would tell him stories about Zeus and Haumea and Odin in her own Mama way because she couldn’t bring her tablet. It was all her when she did that.

She was trying to make him believe he could get some kind of stronger or give him something to cling to before he went under. One or the other or maybe something else? He didn’t know that part.

Like he didn’t know how long he’d been walking. The sun didn’t seem to have moved. He couldn’t hear the travois anymore. Its grinding skid had turned to static. He tried to move faster but his feet were soaking wet in his shoes.

There was green up ahead. Real green. He reached for it. He maybe almost ran. The stones beyond, they weren’t what he’d expected. The wind-worn holes between were small with fragile mineral webbing snapped across. They stood as part of a butte, a very old one, worn down and crumbling in places. Its feet were dotted with scrub. Small dents and hillocks lined the broken stone. One golden gash traced the left side, all shade and branches and soft arcs of stone. 

It smelled musty in the same sort of way the Eridian ruins had, like someone had lived there once and now they were gone in the dust of all the years since then. At the same time, it seemed utterly undisturbed. There wasn’t even a twist of scrap metal or an old tire and those things grew surer than weeds on Pandora.

Troy barely registered that he’d made it anyplace. When he stopped, he might as well have slammed into a wall. His breath was coming in heavy gasps. Every part of him thrummed with pain. He yanked the mask off and scrubbed at his eyes and finally turned to the water on his sister’s lap.

She cracked one eye open at him.

“OK,” he croaked. He crouched. Now that he wasn’t standing, pain flared in the soles of his feet. He let himself take one small swallow of water. He didn’t think he was sweating anymore and that was a bad sign. Best to drink slowly then. But that one little taste, it felt like it filled his whole belly if not every empty space in his torso.

Troy gasped and shoved his head between his knees. He didn’t want to throw up. He really didn’t want to. It was actually easier to focus on how bad he hurt. Speaking of Mama. Speaking of the bathhouse. Speaking of pain.

The bottom of his stomach clenched, a weird sense of arousal creeping through the haze in his head. His hot mind wandered once again.

He saw Mama’s face. She was looking him straight in the eyes. He could tell even if there was a light behind her and it washed her features out. She said, “You should have been a little prince,” as she mopped his sweaty bangs out of his face.

He was asking her do you mean that little prince who didn’t know how to love his rose or some other prince or… 

"I ought never to have run away from her…,” he said. “I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little strategems. Flowers are so inconsistent...”

He could feel Mama’s big, worn hands on the back of his neck as he puked. She was always with her hands in his hair when he threw up. She always kissed his head. Sometimes, she’d just stand there with her lips in his hair as he vomited until his throat bled. 

Then he was back in the water. The cool memory shocked his senses and he had some realization that he made a sound in the waking world, but he couldn’t have said what it was. He and Tyreen were ten, twelve, something like that. They’d snuck out  _ again  _ to the bathhouse because he wasn’t feeling well  _ for a change _ (was that Dad’s voice or hers). She'd always been good at sneaking, hadn’t she? It was in her bones someplace. 

Ty though: “I’ve only been in here by myself since she’s gone. It’s funny.”

The two of them sat on the shallow curve. He was trying not to stare at her. All of a sudden she leaned over him, like he’d done to her the other day. “Hey. You wanna suck? You used to like to suck. Sometimes you got better when you did.”

Suck what?

“I got boobs now, dummy.”

Troy shuddered onto her. He spread her lips against her skin. She didn’t smell like Mama. He didn’t know the word for it. Sweet, maybe. But there was more to it. He eased against her.  _ If I fall asleep like this, do we wake up as fish again, or…? _ he thought and he was trying to breathe as her fingers crept through his hair.

“You in there?” Tyreen asked. She was busily socking him in the side.

Troy started. He stared down at her, unabashed this time; at her chapped lips and the dark circles under her eyes, the way her sunburn had started to peel around the scar on her nose.

He accepted his sudden urge to pinch her there. Flakes of her skin came off on his hand.

“Ouch,” she said. 

“I’m here,” he answered, belatedly. “I needed a minute. How’re you holding up?”

“My ass’s killing me. Help me onto the rocks? That’ll be an improvement at this point.”

Troy nodded, but he also dragged her a few more feet to a patch of sandy soil. He spread one of the emergency blankets under her and let her burrow in her cloak even if it was pretty filthy by then. Frankly, she smelled like fever sick and nosebleeds, there as she leaned back, staring up at the branches creeping up along the side of the gash. “Hey,” she said. “These’re roses.”

Troy took one look and he knew she was right— the thorns and the shape of the leaves. It didn’t matter that there were no blossoms. They had to be what got him thinking before while he was resting. Well. Nodding off. He probably had. “Well, they’re desert plants,” he said, knowing she probably remembered anyway. He then snapped off the headrest off of the car seat and offered it to her for a pillow if she wanted, which she did.

“I got one more thing to do,” he said. “I’ll be back,”

Tyreen shook her head. “You look like shit. Lie down.”

Troy at least sat for the time being. He sighed, halfway smiled. “What’s the big idea pushing me around, lil miss invalid?”

“I dunno. I might not actually want you to die.”

He pretended to think over that part. As things were, he’d had enough of the topic for the time being, a side-effect of the whole being alone thing. He uncrossed his legs. Every time he moved a muscle, the soles of his feet ached and prickled. As he stretched his arm behind his back to work out his biceps, that started the squirm in his toes too.

He ended up grabbing his left foot onto his lap and unfastening his boot. He hadn’t taken them off in days. The loss of weight sent a twitch of wrongness clear to his knee and the pain shot sharp for an instant. Then he felt awfully free, there in his one wet sock.

He could tell what had happened by the way the material stuck to him. The ball of his foot and his ankle were starting to blister. One on his big toe had already broken and the tip of said toe was a bloodied, purple mess. His right foot was more or less the same, except he also had a wound forming along the tarsels of his little toe on the upper side. 

Troy pushed his boots out of the way and washed himself with sterile saline. He guessed he’d change his socks considering how damp the old ones were. Seemed like a waste of socks, but washing them would have spent a cup of water.

Troy had long, diamond-shaped feet with crowded, bent toes. They made the most uncanny shadows when he fanned himself out. Right then, they hurt so bad.

Maybe Tyreen had a point. As though she’d realized he’d thought as much, she beckoned to him from the blanket.

Troy leaned back, resting his head in her armpit. He expected she’d shove him out of place soon enough. Her marked hand settled on his arm. She didn’t feed him exactly, but they sloshed into a sort of equilibrium that involved him getting a push from her.

Her markings stayed lit. His faded. It was her way of saying I told you so.

He’d been in worse shape than someone who needed to be at a damn doctor.

He still had no way to get her there. Not that day. Not that he could see. 

When he spoke up though, it wasn’t about that. He wasn’t even trying to distract her, or himself, but watching the sky try so hard to shine blue. “Do you remember Mama saying...”

“Don’t wanna talk about Mom right now,” said Tyreen. 

That cut, if only because of where his head had been. He shifted enough to reach the hard lump of the sparker under the shirt. “OK. Let’s talk about you. They make better ones than that.”

Tyreen moved too. She laid her other hand on his forehead, pushing him back so she could look him in the face. “This one’s mine.”

“I get that, but I need to ask you something. It’s...”

“No,” No like she didn’t want a taste of the drink he’d ordered. No like she was done looking for the capacitor he’d dropped. But she snickered at the end, tilting away. “You got heat stroke or something.”

He moved his hand from her necklace and placed it on her belly, underneath her navel. He didn’t dare rub her with the bullet wound waiting in her side, but he figured he was nice and warm. Maybe he could be a little bit magic and get her uterus to unfasten, just a little and like she did for his whole body.

Tyreen tipped his way, her knees bending ever so slightly. She took a breath, deep like she meant to tell him something. Instead she sort of gurgled and pushed down against the headrest.

“I’ll say one thing and you say one thing. I mean, if stuff’s bothering you.”

“Troy,  _ seriously _ .”

“And then I’ll take a nap and not run myself ragged once I wake up. OK?”

This was met with a groan. He waited on that final no. Instead: “I don’t think we knew Mom...”

“...at all.”

So they were settled about that, the two of them, resting there together. He almost wanted to ask her where  _ her  _ mind had been, what she’d dreamed waiting for him to rest. But he’d promised. One thing.

Tyreen said, “Same went for Dad. I mean.”

“Yeah. You’re kinda the only person I do know. And we were fish together.”

“That shit again?” The disgust lining her remark felt false, but it was still there.

“It’s good you’re not a complete asshole,” he said that with a smirk, craning up at him.

“Same.” Tyreen drew her marked hand up. She covered his eyes. “Go to sleep.”

Troy had no choice at that point.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I recognize that the manner I’ve described the twins being conjoined is unlikely, but they’re already conjoined semi-fraternal twins with space magic, so…
> 
> Also, I’ve been trying to reflect the attenuated day/night cycle on Pandora, but I understand there’s no way I’m hitting 90 hours per day. Just squint and pretend.
> 
> Updated 7/28/2020.


	8. Chapter 8

Troy wasn’t sure how long or even if he slept. It had been so long since he had, his bones felt like they had forgotten how. He didn’t dream, so he couldn’t go by that.

His sister’s fingers stirred against his forehead. He kept realizing that she still had her hand on his face. Under her it was dark and calm. If he never slipped out of consciousness, he was still content to lay where he did. He spent more time than he meant to. He could taste as much. 

As he finally dragged himself some kind of awake, Troy checked her pulse. Tyreen’s blood pressure was up from the past day. Had it only been one day? Well, the ones on Pandora lasted so long.

Up was good in her case after all the blood she had lost. He thought there might be something off about her heartbeat though. He couldn’t quite think of the word, besides hopefully. As in hopefully it was something in her body trying to compensate for the low volume. 

There wasn’t a damn thing he could do if she was sliding into some injury-related arrhythmia. 

So he hoped. 

She pulled on his bangs before rolling away from him. Troy was going to ask if she wanted to toilet herself or walk, but he found her smiling where she rested, so he didn’t disturb her more than sifting around in the pack to find his socks.

The shadows were the color of cheap whiskey now. Spins of cirrus clouds swept over the gravel dunes and he could see them, so there must have been a hint of color to the sky. It made him wince without his mask.

He put that on and did what he could to bandage his feet, stuffing gauze into his socks before he pulled his boots and his hood back on. His share of the water tasted like spit, but that happened towards the ends of the bottles. Most of what he needed for his job had ended up in the burst bottom of his pack, but he hadn’t expected to use it. Well, maybe the trowel, which had to be scrubbed after its trip through the busted SAT-V engine, but the plastic kitting? Not at all. 

He made his way down the slide of stones at the entrance of the gash, and went in search of softer soil.

With the butte to draw moisture from incidental storms, he expected a gully or flash of something he could dig close by. The nearest soft ground though lay several dozen yards from the place he’d left his sister. He didn’t want to be dragging her down the highway to drink. There was always the option of bringing water back, though he’d have to siphon it out of any wells he dug.

Troy retraced his steps, searching for another place, checking and rechecking the strands along the cliff. Scrub seemed to have grown out of dead rock in most places. Some of the top ground layer fissured when he kicked it in frustration, but that was nearly it.

Troy stooped. He took a fragment of the topsoil and popped it into his mouth. It was tangy and powdery and dried his mouth out. So, not just hardpan, but a fine clay hardpan full of aluminum, not something he had the equipment to dig out. Not  _ exactly _ . 

He climbed into the gash, opened the pack, and loaded Tyreen’s Maliwan with the electrical bullets she’d insisted on buying their first week on Pandora. Troy still thought it was ridiculous that anyone went out of their way to anodize bullets. “It makes them easier to tell apart!” the arms dealer had insisted. That might have been true for some people, but they smelled off to Troy compared to the other ammunition he dealt with.

“Hey,” he said before he left. “If you hear gunshots, that’s me and nothing’s wrong.”

Tyreen chuffed at him. 

Having headed back to the desert, he marked out a pair of arcs on the hardpan using his boots. 

Submachine guns were his least favorite weapons. They shook and they climbed and they tore everything they hit to bits. His arm could have been that of a strong man or a monster, it still would have sucked aiming the Maliwan one-handed.

Troy took a deep breath, straightened his mask, and shot up the hardpan. It exploded in white dust and crackles of light. Both took forever to clear, but once they did he saw he’d made enough space to work through. He fisted the trowel and started digging.

The spot he had chosen was in the shade this time of day, but in the morning the sun would warm it. He tried to work quickly. The faster he set up each well, the sooner they’d make mouthfuls of water. He still had only himself and his one hand and the trowel. Spumes of dirt drifted back in his face and onto his shoulders as he pressed down and down into the soil. After a certain point, it was cooler than the dusty air. He stopped minding so much, realizing that. He dug faster. 

He didn’t think he'd grown at all since the last time he’d practiced, but the width of the hole still tracked up too small in his mind as he walked his fingers across it. He shook out his hand and tried again, then widened the margin by the width of his thumb joint. Too small, and the well wouldn’t make much water. Too wide, and that was space for failure he didn’t need. He began to scrape down, neatening the circle as he went and tossing the larger stones he struck into a pile of their own.

At the bottom, he hollowed out a second, smaller cavity, and brought out a collapsible plastic bowl. He opened this and placed it in the pit with a length of tubing. Then, he stretched clear plastic sheeting over the hole, using the rocks he’d dug out to pin it in place as he weighed the center down with bullet casings. He could adjust the angle better with a handful of those than with a single stone. He wanted the plastic to dip over the bowl. This way, as water condensed out of the soil, it would drip into the bowl for them to drink. 

Once he’d covered the edges of the plastic with the turned over dirt and clay, the well looked more or less like the ones he’d dug back on Nekrotafeyo. The soil was a different color, the sheeting from a kit rather than the stash in the storage cellar, but otherwise. Troy wondered how this water would taste. What Nekrotafeyo gave up had been sweet and alkaline compared to the stuff he’d had on Pandora. 

Once he’d mopped the sweat out of his eyes, he began again. The second well didn’t seem to take as long, and the lip came out smoother. He wasn’t sure if this made much difference, but he almost let himself be proud of it for the handful of moments he rested between. 

The third lasted as long as the other two combined. He let himself feel the ache in his arm not long after he started. Every swing hit him in the shoulder joint. Going more slowly and easing off on sudden movements wasn’t an option though. They needed water. That wouldn’t change.

As he pressed on, his mind again tried to wander. That had been alright for walking and maybe for driving, but the hole required stricter concentration. He had no way to mend it if he dug it wrong.

Still, there came that echo of a debate he’d held with himself for as long as he could remember.

Troy wished he had two hands. The idea hit him that much harder than it had when he’d been working on Tyreen. Time had been so short then, not enough of it left for the thought to sink in.

Troy loathed the idea of having two hands. There wasn’t anything wrong with him. He was exactly as he was supposed to be— missing pieces, indelibly fucked up and better with wrenches than anyone else he’d ever run into.

He sat back on his heels, panting. He still had a foot and the smaller hole to go. 

When they got out of this, he’d deal with replacing his sister’s stuff and then see about finding a prosthetic. He’d suck it up. He wouldn’t have to wear the thing all the time, just when he needed it for moments like this, maybe negotiating and maybe working. The memory of the man in the last town still left a rotten taste in his mouth. And he hadn’t even been the first, only the most graphic about what he  _ really  _ wanted.

Troy thought that maybe if he’d had a plate of bone at his shoulder instead of the silky-looking dimple, his situation wouldn’t bother him as much. He could have one installed, perhaps, but it would cost a lot more than bracer-bottomed prosthetic. Besides, that assumed it was fixable in the first place. Sometimes human tissue settled particular ways and not even high end nanotech could change this. He had a hunch about his scars. They would come back no matter what he did. Mama had hinted they’d be that way once after she’d gotten done working on him. She made him sound like a workbench project when she put it that way. 

A shovel. A shovel would have been more useful than a second hand. Next town over? They were buying a damn shovel and people could joke about the bodies they must have to bury.

(Like Pandorans buried anything when the desert was perfectly content to eat every shit, every corpse, every dirty secret.)

He laughed as he got back to work, then promptly choked on the dust he made.

By the time he finished, condensation had beaded on the underside of the first hole’s plastic. He leaned back on his hand and winced. He'd ripped one cuticle open and bruised the underside of his wrist slamming the trowel handle as he rushed. His fingers still worked alright, so he didn’t worry about that when he had handiwork to inspect.

So far, no leaks. There were windshield rain droplets in places, not only mist. They crept into each other while he watched. It made his mouth try to water.

He didn’t figure it would hurt if he watched for a while. 

“Hey! Come back, jerkoff! Don’t leave me!”

Troy jumped. His brain clicked onto the fact that was his sister’s voice. He stood. Pain shot through his feet, then his back as he bent suddenly to grab the gun and the trowel. He wasn’t leaving those out in the open, and so picked his way back to the gash with them pressed awkwardly against his side.

Tyreen had pushed up on her elbows to shout. As soon as she saw him, she dropped back.

He hated to think she’d worn herself out yelling. “I’m right here, Ty. Shit.” The words scraped in his mouth. He’d gotten so parched he could hardly speak. 

She didn’t answer him, just sort of groaned and kicked her feet.

He had no idea what the hell he was supposed to say, or if he could say much of anything without a drink first. Troy grabbed the mostly empty jug, turned his back, and chugged— four swallows in place of three. He couldn’t help himself. His throat was screaming for water and that got worse for an instant as what he’d taken settled in his stomach. 

He licked his lips and set the bottle aside. “The fact I was gone got to you, but the shots didn’t?” 

“You warned me about that part,” said Tyreen. “Then I woke up and you were gone.” 

“Long day. Don’t have the stuff to leave you a note.” The afternoon at least finally felt like it was slipping towards evening cool and night creatures, but he’d deal with the last when they came. For right then, he sidled back to her and sat down within reach of the pack, of her. He let the pack be and rubbed the raw spots on his wrist over Tyreen’s forehead. She felt sun-warm and annoyed. “How’s your actual bullet wound?”

“It’s like throbbing. Cramps are fucking wicked. Little dizzy. I don’t wanna sit up.”

Did throbbing count as hurting? She wasn’t supposed to swallow anything until at least twenty-four hours after the pain stopped; forty-eight was better. Days on Pandora were so much longer besides and they’d ended up without a clock. “OK,” Troy said. He’d waited enough seconds to answer that she could probably taste him hesitating. 

Tyreen rolled out from underneath his wrist. She tried to scowl, but her next breath turned into a shaky sigh. “I don’t feel good. And where’d you go?”

“Dug us three solar wells in some old dirt, so they should work pretty good.”

“You’re actually doing that stupid hole trick?”

“Sure. Not like the dowsing rod survived the wreck.”

“Heh.” She then turned her hand up to her face, toying with them as though she had something to count out. “There’s only two of us,” she concluded.

“Just in case. Not sure how much they’ll make. But if you wanna help wet them down sometime, let me know.” He smiled. It didn’t seem to matter as much now that her piss trick kind of grossed him out. Urinating beside solar wells was supposed to recycle at least part of the leavings into water.

“Maybe.” She closed her eyes after, covering them with her forearm and coughing a little. “Hmm.”

“Hmm, what?”

“Nothing.”

“C’mon.

“You ever wonder what if...” Tyreen bit on the next word or possibly her dry tongue. “…there was more than two of us? If we had a little brother or something.”

Troy nodded before he managed to think better of it. The idea had struck him sometimes in the quiet of the world where they’d grown up. It had always felt too sharp to touch for more than a breath. Now, here they were, lightyears away and in pain. He said, “You wouldn’t have woken up by yourself,” all conversationally. 

“It’s not that,” said Tyreen. “I dunno. You dug three holes in an hour like you were  _ supposed to _ .”

“Yeah well…” Troy raised an eyebrow. “I thought you were asleep?”

“In and out. Seemed like an hour.”

“It was more than an hour.” He turned her way for what he said next, picking through the words. “I know Dad wanted a big family. He talked about it once or twice when it was just the two of us. Didn’t look me in the face either time. It was like, ‘Oh, look. I didn’t even end up with a whole son, so let me rub this in.’”

“Sounds like him. That’s why I tried not to let him talk.” Tyreen wrinkled her nose and snorted. “He never told me anything like that. Not that it even kinda mattered.”

“Hey, Ty.”

“Is this about Mom again? Don’t I get to have a moment?”

“You  _ are  _ a moment,” Troy said. It felt like it had been a while since then too, since they’d gone at it like he was trying to do now. Pandora hadn’t left them without humor, but there’d been so much to learn, so much of their lives that needed them present. If Nekrotafeyo was watching clouds drift past, much like they were both doing in that moment, Pandora saw them making their own clouds. 

“Always,” Tyreen said. 

“Feels like I almost missed you there for a while. We weren’t together so much after you hit that last growth spurt.” Then all of a sudden there he’d been, taking her orders, hauling parts to Mama’s grave in the still of the night while mantas whistled at each other in the reefs. No wonder so much was filtering up to the surface in their downtime. He finally had his sister back. Even if it was in this strange, tenuous way.

“Brother woulda come in handy for that too.”

“Why are they a brother?” Troy snickered.

“‘cause brothers are fun to push around.”

“The secret comes out.”

“Oh, like you didn’t figure  _ that _ out the night we made a break for it. I literally had to drag you into the ship.”

“Actually had to drag me.” He could still feel her hands on his back, hear her laughing at him. Like he shouldn’t have been surprised about any part of her escape plan. “Guess I really didn’t get it. That’s why I kept hesitating.” 

“Whatever. Figured you were hung up on trying to get the Eridian tech to recognize you as, you know, alive.” 

“That would have been cool. Those sword arms we used to turn up.” Troy gestured the length of one reaching out in front of him. Even the smallest would have been long and awkward on his body, besides pretty useless most of the time. “Little sister with tiny hands would have been perfect for picking one clean. Making her change your pad. Getting ragged on from both sides at once.”

“Ugh. Don’t talk about the pad I don’t have. I know I’m gonna bleed through these shorts. Gonna owe you like five new pairs.”

“So what? We got other stuff to worry about.” Though it seemed like he’d hardly sat down, Troy stood once more. That was definitely some blush in the sky, evening approaching at last. “Like, how about I build my little sister a fort?”

“Can’t see the stars in a fort,” Tyreen said. “Also, I’m older.”

“My feet came out first.”

“Feet don’t count.”

Troy countered this by sticking the sole of his boot close to her face.

“Eww! Eww! Eww!” She gave him one weak swat and then another. They both started to laugh, though the sound was dried out and raspy and for her it ended in a coughing fit laced with fucks.

Troy got the second emergency blanket out of its pack. It was a good thing they’d sprung for the large ones. He had plenty to work with. The walls of the gash staggered in places, so wedging the two roll bars into place only took a handful of minutes and a certain amount of brute force. With nothing firm to use as a crosspiece, he took a length of rope, lashing it to one bar only to find Tyreen trying to loop it around the other without sitting up. Rather interrupt, he let her go, pretending to fuss with his own fastening until she snapped the rope. 

The second blanket got draped over top, pinned in place with work light clamps, the same way he and Tyreen would hang swags between Eridian bulkheads, stringing up tattered gossamer curtains from the ship and pretending they were sheiks or corporate robber barbarians or sometimes both at the same time. The emergency blanket was much more opaque and it rustled in the air even once he’d gotten it pretty well in place. His sister’s hand beckoned from the shadow beneath, then pointed to the last corner.

“Hold that over here so I can put a tie on it. And get me some string.”

Troy did both of these things, though the string was shreds of one of the partially melted ropes. Tyreen was damn good at tying knots when she felt like it. Once she held the corner of the blanket back to him, it had a neat loop double fastened in place. “See if you can loop that over the screw.”

He could. The fit was a little loose, but she’d left him an end to pull if he wanted to cinch it in place. He leaned down with a thumbs up.

“Alright! We got a fort.” That in spite of the fact she’d complained about it at first. That was what it was. 

Troy left the tied corner up. He sat back down and this time took the flat tweezers from the med kit, pinning it between his knees. “I’m gonna see if I can clean my nails off. There’s supposed to be fungus that comes up when you dig. Nasty stuff.”

“Think that’s only after it rains, but yeah.” Tyreen gestured that she swept the mere idea away. “Put your head down again when you’re done.”

He wanted to tell her their conversation counted as rest. Instead, he kind of didn’t say anything, not right then. What else was there to talk about between two people who’d built a blanket fort on Pandora of all places?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 7/28/2020.


	9. Chapter 9

Evening coiled across the desert, slow and violet. The gash became a thicket of insect wings as the shadows faded away to nothing. Nocturnal sauroraptors trilled down by the road. Tyreen slept. Troy loaded his pistol, then pocketed a spare clip, some rope, and the binoculars. He stuck the ripped scabbard of their knife between his belt and the waist of his pants.

They hadn’t left Nekrotafeyo with much, but they hadn’t had much to leave  _ with _ . __ So, there was Troy, about to go hunting by himself, wondering if it would have been the most ridiculous thing he’d ever done if he’d brought the remains of their gossamer tents along. They could have kept them for luck, or some stupid shit like that.

Luck was something people made for themselves, easy as cheating at cards, yearning as looking back on the decent pieces of a childhood; remembering the tents at all and the cheerful deception in his father’s voice as he counted one more hand of five-card stud at the boy Troy happened to be. 

There probably wouldn’t be any counting about supper for his sister, but Troy decided he was lucky that night, gossamer or not. Maybe his whole mood was like Mama used to say:  _ There’s nothing more nostalgic than a young man. Well, except for a very old man!  _ Dad would insist he was neither. Mama would call him and Troy her babies so they had to be quiet together.

Troy still would have liked a twist of gossamer around his wrist, just for the part where he’d get to make Tyreen put it on him before he headed out. He guessed he had to be a young man by now and that he liked that more than ‘boy’. Then he slid into the desert.

He had it in his mind that if there was a settlement close by, it would be easier to spot after dark. Starting off, he scrambled up the side of the butte and stared south until his eyes crossed under the binocular viewfinder. Another butte stood twenty miles off, crumbling by a bend in the highway. Hardpan and rocky desert gravel stretched on in all other directions, old erosion ripples casting like waves. There weren’t even any dead trees this time and certainly no lights. 

Troy let himself down in a spatter of stone chips and thoughts about how lights had simply meant other living things back on Nekrotafeyo. There almost everything glowed, even the lucernae parasites that sucked the air coral into osseous nothingness. 

But lucernae made decent travel markers for the handful of seasons they lived. Without anything like them to go by, Troy decided he’d keep to the road. Any signs of settlement he’d missed would show up there, and the walk wouldn’t be as hard on his blisters. He could have hunted barefoot without those, spared himself some noise. If he’d had something he could have used as bait though… 

Did he want to go that far making his own luck? Troy turned his arm so the veins beneath his skin showed. 

No, it was too risky to cut himself. He had no one else’s hands to stop the bleeding and he didn’t want a pack of thirsty skags bearing down on him. Or a stalker. Those were awful to kill and tasted like iodine when Tyreen used their life to open his.

The thought still made him rustle inside. He was going to need a hit soon, something to stave off the liquor-splintering daydreams his nervous system insisted on making.

Troy tucked his hand against the butt of his pistol. He listened, smelled and felt how the night waxed. That was his job when he and Tyreen went hunting together. Tyreen made a decent tracker, but she had to be in the mood. ‘Besides, you smell kinda dead, so that’s less chance you’ll scare dinner, right?’ He never argued with that. He liked watching her go in for a kill, that finger-snap when she went from stalking to striking and everything turned crazy for a handful of seconds until she started laughing. 

Since she usually laughed. Maybe that would change after their run-in with the bandits. He hoped not, but that was his nostalgia welling again when he should have been watching where he was going. He wasn’t handling his lonesome quiet well. Nightfall seemed to have made it worse. 

Troy paused to scan the banks of gravel along the pavement and he breathed deeply, searching for whatever scents might have shifted. He couldn’t say for sure if he smelled dead since he could not smell himself, but the must of the gash had gone. He thought he caught a note of dampness somewhere upwind and so moved that way, which took him off of the road after all.

At the place where he came down, he found the stalks of a pokealoe snapped off at sharp angles. Something a bit narrower than himself had passed this way, its path winding towards a bank of low stones. A human sort of thing to do, he noted, since stones wouldn’t hold footprints. Then again if there was water nearby, that would attract most everything and he’d have a place to wait out thirsty prey. 

Troy approached another space of broken succulents, somewhat off of the way he was heading, but bent in the opposite direction. He expected scat or maybe fetal remains. Instead, he accidentally put his boot down on a footprint.

A  _ hoofprint _ , slender and split. More like it twisted out through the scrub and dusty voids between gravel runs. So, a few somethings, out of place since nothing native to Pandora grew two-toed hooves. He’d heard stories of early settlers losing cows and aurochs though. Those were supposed to be good to eat. He just hoped one was small enough for him to drag. 

Troy pulled himself onto the stones and crept through the moonlight, heading towards the place where the tangles of footprints parted. Whatever he was chasing, they knew to stay away from the highway. They might have lived in the valley for some long while, long enough they knew the road for what it was and to come out at night. 

Thinking on that, he looked back into the last slather of evening light. The butte where Tyreen slept didn’t seem that far away. Even if he found nothing, he could still go back and rest and feel his sister’s forehead. Maybe she’d laugh at him for sucking at something as easy as hunting, and he’d remind her that it took him a little more than a touch to kill.

He considered, and not for the first time, that for all her bravada, ‘Tyreen DeLeon’ must work out to a lonely state of being, especially with him in the equation. He was never alone. She was always at least kind of alone. He could sell his ass on the street and get all of the physical company he could ever want, plated up with ammo and money and beer. She was never going to have a trick or a one-night-stand or a girl with green eyes to call her own. Every time she saw him, she’d remember she just had a brother who knew that she found green eyes appealing and who’d accepted a faceful of laundry water as an answer to how come. 

He’d have taken fifty more for her to be with him that night. Not only since that would find her well again, but given what happened next— the scene was suited for two hunters.

Troy had slunk into some place lower than where he started. It had happened gradually, but on his next glance, the rocky feet of the butte were gone from his view. He turned forwards once again, not realizing he’d looked over his shoulder. His movement ran thick with instinct. Something stirred up ahead. Something faintly luminescent.

Troy held his breath.

These were deer, or they’d been deer once. Their legs were drifter-slender, marked with streaks of blue and red. Their bodies curved like starving dogs and their lips pulled back from their ragged teeth. They all grew horns, waves of bone curving towards their spines.

Troy had never heard of anything like them living on Pandora, not from his father and not from the most haggard of bartenders. He wondered if he hadn’t underestimated his own hunger and started to see things, though there was no sense of elevation riding in his back. 

He could smell them though, vegetable garbage and fusil oil. 

The deer picked at a skag corpse, pawing at the open ribs and licking away curls of gray meat. One sucked up a tendril another had been nosing at. They huffed at each other and showed their fangs. The one that had gone hungry stalked off.

It stalked right towards Troy. 

He’d come across them so quickly that he hadn’t had a chance to hide. Not that there was much he could do besides press himself down against the stones. 

Troy drew his gun. The deer saw him. It watched, nostrils flaring. 

The rest of the herd stopped picking, one by one. He considered a warning shot. But there was just this  _ waiting _ , stranded there against the stones.

The biggest deer and its mate stalked off into the shadows. A few others cast about, tilting on their hooves to get better looks at him. The one that had first come his way trotted closer, legs flickering like cyalumes.

Troy couldn’t focus on the movement. The deer was  _ closer  _ all of a sudden, near enough he could make out the worn patches of fur on its neck; old teeth marks, scarred over. As it slipped into circling him, he realized it was not alone. Two more had come around, swaying in step by step.

They didn’t know what he was.

Why should they? He had long, glowing limbs like they did, but then again, only one. Why did he smell like death? Why wouldn’t he eat them or with them? He was a strangeness to the deer, more than he’d ever been to a john or a jane or a handsy scrap broker. In the slicks of their eyes, he made no sense at all. 

They came and they looked and they sniffed, striding close to his sides and slipping off. Except for the first one. It crept out of his vision and back, searching his body with a stoic sort of interest.

Troy took an experimental step backwards. The rasp of his boots got the heard pricking their ears. None of them fled, but a few backed off. He kept his arm out for the next handful of movements, swaying to make himself bob the way their knees did. It put him at a certain amount of risk. If they decided to bite, his hand was in danger. Hell, so was his gun.

He fell into these sideways steps, the deer trotting after him in eerie glints. There came a howling in the distance. All of them, he and the creatures, looked out towards the horizon where it had come from. They all turned away from one another, and then back. The dance between wound out faster after, two of his steps for every one of the deer shared. 

He must have led them a hundred yards before any of them turned back. He still hadn’t come as near to the butte as he would have liked, but between the howls and the hesitation starting in the herd, he was going to have to make a move soon.

The curious one slid closer still, sniffing him. Troy turned on the toes of his boots. The deer drifted at his shoulder. He was careful not to look it in the eyes, in case it spooked rather than showing him more of the teeth that cut its smile, more old wounds.

This one had been too brave for its own good once before. Anyway, that was the story that slid together in his head as he reached out once more.

The deer watched his markings in the dimness.

Troy rested the barrel of the pistol on the tips of its fur, feeling for the bone clots along its spine. 

The deer was reaching its head up to his face when he fired. Blood and chips of vertebrae splashed across the gravel. The blowback hit him in the chest and face. The deer screamed. Its herd bolted— Troy saw them flash from the corners of his awareness, down into the deeper banks. Insects and other night creatures burst up around him at the noise, dust breaking through the shadows. 

Out of the rush he realized, the deer was still shrieking, still grinding, still moving. Only its back legs had given way. He hadn’t gone high enough when he’d shot out its spine.

He dodged out of range of its broken mouth and he ran.

The thing crawled after him, snarling and bleeding and dribbling shit.

Troy ran towards the highway. He tried to draw a bead, but his only clear target was the head. He had no way to focus on the glowing legs churning straight at him. In a fit of desperation, he dropped his gun and snapped off the dried spire of a pokealoe. He lunged, burying the point in one of its black eyes. As it reared, he brought all of his weight down on its knee. A wild crack followed. Then more squirming. He caught the still-living hoof in his side and spilled the knife out of his waistband, but he reeled and he grabbed the leg that had struck him and he bent as hard as he could.

The deer yowled on, hoarse and bloody, as he caught his breath.

Troy groped his gun out of the brush. Throwing it to empty his hand had made a dent in the grip. The knife was no better and no worse off and he still had at least most of the rope. 

Troy picked his way through the deer muck, tying the animal’s dead knees together.

It watched him with its one remaining eye and its cries grew weaker, only breaking strong again when he started to pull. Then it began to cry. The blood in Troy’s own spine ran cold at the sound. He told himself it was only his own hunger pangs. It couldn’t be sympathy, not after some of the things his sister had eaten and spit back into him.

The deer didn’t weigh much more than Tyreen on the travois, but it fought him, thrashing with the weight of its neck and still bleeding, still bleating in pain. In the distance, hungry other creatures answered, skags and what might have been the rest of the herd. Troy only knew for certain what they sounded like when they were dying. 

The deer had lived here for enough generations that they changed and become part of the landscape. So many creatures on Pandora turned to hunting when that finally happened and then there was Troy. He’d hunted, hadn’t he? And all by himself. He knew what the death throes of glowing deer sounded like and that his side ached and his hand was going to be scratched all to hell by the time he dragged his prize back to the butte. His ears were starting to hurt too, even as the wails behind him gave way to grunts and panting breaths. He tried to move faster. The fight had gone out of the deer. He was down to counting its sighs, sensing the numbers slowing. 

Troy made it back to the solar wells. He could still smell the cordite in the night air. He brought the deer up close to the far side of the scruff of rocks leading into the gash, then climbed up. There he toppled into the dust. The knife fell out of his belt again. He lay panting and hurting until the nearby silence struck him in the rawness of his last nerves. 

Troy crawled to the tent, lifting the flap. He didn’t think to hook it. 

Tyreen stared out at him, her lips cocked in one of her sour, little sneers.

“I got dinner,” he said.

“The fuck was all that!” she spat before he’d finished the last word. “Where’ve you  _ been _ ?”

“I said I got dinner. It’s not gonna last much longer. C’mon.” He offered his hand in encouragement even if it was battered and dirty. 

Tyreen shoved herself out of reach, wincing as she did it. “Don’t touch me!”

Troy set his teeth. “It’s not far, but it’s big. I can’t get it up here. You gotta come with me.”

“I’m not even hungry!”

“Well, I kinda am so…” Maybe he shouldn’t have glanced away when he said that. He knew she hated it when he didn’t manage to be direct about asking for the one thing only she could give him.

It made sense then, that look she held at him. “I’m not going anywhere! Get it up here or get lost! Fucking hell!”

“Ty, please.”

“No! Look, I asked you to do one thing.”

“And I told you I was going. Would you stop acting this way?” Troy tried to sigh. The sound choked out of him.

“I told you!” Tyreen insisted. She brought her hand down somewhere on herself. He couldn’t tell where between the dimness and the wreck of the cloak.

“I don’t remember right now.” Though he was trying, his mind racing and spinning. His face felt hot from it or that might have been from the truth of his situation sinking in. “I really need something to eat. I’m exhausted,” he admitted.

“I said no! Go away!”

They were running out of time. The deer was down to the dregs of its life. What was he supposed to do, tell her about dancing with the damn thing? As if that would sway her. “Fucking hell, what are you so angry about?” Troy snapped, only half-surprised by the bitterness in his voice.

Tyreen growled from the shade of the cloak, but she peered up at him in another instant. He almost wished she hadn’t. “I keep telling you it hurts and I’m thirsty and I don’t wanna and all you wanna do is talk about Mama and  _ leave _ .” Shit, she was looking at him like… Something from the edges of their past.

Just what, that slipped him too. He fought on, trying to reason with her. “I can’t do anything about any of that right now, OK?” Troy jerked his shoulder to the water jugs. He hadn’t left the one empty, had he? A shot of panic crossed him. “And you better not have  _ drunk  _ while I was gone!” Water in her injured guts would spread any infection that much faster.

“So what if I did?” In asking, her own voice got all silky like it did sometimes and she gave him that look, that wanting sort before she sunk back to herself. “Go dig some military cherries outta your bag if you’re so damn hungry!”

She hadn’t. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t have been that stupid. They didn’t have time for any of this. “Tyreen Calypso, you’d better...” Troy hadn’t meant to say her name like that, but his voice stumbled into a diction he knew, even if Dad would have called her DeLeon.

“That’s not my name!” she screamed, like the wounded thing she was.

Troy raked his fingers through his hair. “You’re the one who started it and you’re the one who decided we’d use Mama’s name.”

“Was not. That was your idea, Bro.”

“It was too you! What is your problem?”

“I told you!” 

Troy reminding himself:  _ she’s hurt. You don’t have much longer. _ “Now’s really not the time for you to be feeling sorry for yourself.”

“Then when is the time? I’m not feeding you! Go away.” She stretched on her shoulder as she said that. Playing at making herself comfortable.

Troy didn’t know if he’d ever been so tired before in his life, so the blaze of adrenaline that hit him in the next moment felt like a shock from a stun gun. “You’re gonna hurt yourself! Now get up.” He reached for her. He was going to take her hand. The unmarked one. He was going to hug her all the way down to the deer.

Tyreen uppercut him as hard as she could. It was maybe half the force she could have put behind the blow normally, but it felt like it knocked his teeth into his skull and his vision slammed out in hot stars along the edges. 

She whimpered. 

He didn’t make a sound besides the blood coursing from his lips and into his lap. 

Her voice came fragile, but clear. ”I said no. And don’t you ever talk to me like that again.”

Troy had to tear himself away. The first time to spit. The second, he could hardly move, but he made himself get to his feet. “I’m walking over there. You calm the fuck down.” He didn’t say anything about where there might be.

He’d figured that was the end of it. He went to the water jugs and he shook them. There was a little left in the one he’d taken for empty. Had he drained it this far? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t ask her right now. Except he… He probably should. He could hardly see where he was going. But he should. But he didn’t.

He stood toes on the way down from the gash, not quite sure how he’d gotten there.

“Stop leaving me! Troy!”

“You wanna die here?” Troy asked the desert, wiping his mouth on the back of his dirty arm. Fuck, he could taste the deer blood mixing with his own and fuck, it was rank.

“Maybe I do!”

“Well, guess what? That actually is my problem too, or did you just forget!? You don’t get to make this decision.”

The answer should have been that of course she did. She was always that one particular step ahead of him.

Maybe two now, the way his head was swimming after that punch.

She really shouldn’t have lunged like she had. Wasn’t good for her wound. Or her knuckles.

Troy slid down the stones.

“Don’t do this to me!”

He sat there watching moth-things and sand settle around him. The daze refused to wear off.

He thought, maybe if she said please. Maybe he’d go back up there before he was done trying to fight his way back to himself. No, that was petty of him.

Maybe if… 

But the desert got so quiet then. The only sound out of place came as the deer moaning at him. 

Troy handled maybe a minute of that. Then he put a bullet in its brain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lucernae is just Latin for lamps. I had Google and two minutes. I think you know what I'm talking about. Couldn't find a name for them anyplace. 
> 
> Updated 7/28/2020.


	10. Chapter 10

What even was he doing?

Troy lay on his back in the dead grass. He stared up at the sky and listened to the air creeping in and out of his chest, the night creatures coursing each other’s shadows across the hardpan. 

He didn’t know how long he’d been down there. The stars had rolled over above him, he thought. There were so many of them, swirls and sprays and single points of brightness rising into the dark places at the corners of his vision.

Tyreen liked those. She’d used to tell Mama that  _ clearly  _ they were the strongest stars, having whole stretches of the sky all their own. Great cosmic bullies and queens and pirate captains.  _ Some of ‘em are even blue like your eyes.  _ Where ‘your’ meant Mama most of the time and maybe once or twice him.

Troy kept waiting for her voice through the same breaths where he never wanted to hear it again.

He hurt. He was tired. The sensation of fading away had slithered into his bones, gloaming and stretching, leaving him with this other restless ache against the rest. The wet muscle under his tongue felt like someone had tried to twist it apart. That wasn’t even where Tyreen had hit him, but the pain showed up there. 

He wasn’t going back up to her. What exactly was he supposed to do for her anyway? His heart was beating on fumes. 

He gave himself the vaguest touch somewhere under his ribs. He felt like he was still there. He halfway knew he wasn’t. He  _ probably  _ wouldn't disappear, but he would stop living in this certain inimitable way if he didn’t get plied open soon.

His longing for his sister trickled close to skin hunger and it bloomed in his veins, mixed with a sharp awareness that he needed a touch. It made the wrong side of his surface crawl and want; his veins and his spinal nerves thrum with need.

Sometimes it got better if he rubbed himself, a quick and dirty fix that didn’t last. He couldn’t press his hands together, but he could wipe his fingers along his neck or down his chest like he was doing now and until he stung with warmth.

He should have taken a blanket. Taking a blanket would have meant snapping the tent apart. He absolutely shouldn’t have done that.

Troy lifted his hand. He flexed his fingers against the spatter of stars. Elpis and its halo of clouds cast pale colors through the night. His markings looked dim by comparison. They were quiet at the moment, the red washed out to the color of an old bloodstain.

Pretty fitting, he guessed. 

Another ship trailed along the shadows of his knuckles. Well, he thought it was another ship. As he chased his fingertip after it, he recognized the line it traveled. Besides, out of any town’s light, he could see it had no fire on the nose and so couldn’t be leaving the atmosphere. 

That was a satellite, probably a Dahl, suspended between Pandora and Elpis with a solar sail or hydrogen scoops so the moon didn’t steal it away. There were probably a hundred more exactly the same, crisscrossing and toppling over each other and singing down ECHO pings.

Troy, without his ECHO, would be invisible to it. He lifted his middle finger and he watched it trace off towards the Milky Way, disappear through the stones lining the feet of the butte, the space above his head. He didn’t notice he’d fallen into drawing his knuckles back and forth against his empty sleeve until it was out of sight.

His nerves unfolded after. He felt there and he felt  _ hard _ . It only lasted a blurry few instants. What he’d thought while the guy fucked him back at the last town was still true. He didn’t have much sense of touch or give in his scar. He didn’t even believe there was supposed to be any part of him there.

Somebody else belonged in that space. The scar was a slick sense of loneliness. It felt like the inside of a mollusk shell and if he got more than that out of it, he’d started to lose himself. 

Troy squeezed. He knew both sides of his own touch. Then he didn’t. He’d just— forgotten where he ended. 

Tyreen’s old wounds had seemed silky by comparison, maybe because she had no bones in the way. Or was her body that much softer, healthier, alive,  _ right  _ at the end of the hour?

Troy leaned back even though he had nowhere to go against the stone. He pressed a finger into the divot of his missing shoulder and remembered how squirmy and alive she’d felt under his touch. How her heart had raced. How she’d cried and bitten and loved on him. Not that she loved  _ him _ , but sometimes she handled him more gently than she did other people and sometimes she licked the wounds she gave him.

He shouldn’t be thinking about his gutshot sister’s belly while he was dizzy up with fading out of being. 

But he’d never been allowed to take care of her before. 

There in the dust he let himself feel it: his longing for some shade of tenderness with Tyreen. But he knew just as well as he knew his scar: she couldn’t live with any softness showing. That went against the nature of her being. He projected impossible intimacies onto her because the only other person in his life who could have held them was gone.

How many times had he bitten back “let me help you” when they got into hunting accidents? How many times had he stopped himself from stroking her hair when she puked? How many times had that hurt bandit in his daydreams been  _ her _ ? 

He really didn’t know another way she’d ever let him come that particular kind of close to her. And yes, he wanted to be the one to do it, wanted to be the one to cross that gulf between them. Wanted to win her over with a kiss, a caress, a bandage. Something like from a fairy tale.

He could have kissed her when she was crying. Just a little on her cheek, maybe the corner of her mouth. The hollow at the hinge of her jaw… no, that was someplace lovers kissed, damn sensitive in certain people. He didn’t know how hers felt.

He hadn’t realized he’d kicked over onto his side until he stopped himself on that, his sister glancing across his mind in the same moment he brushed the soft skin at the crease of his thighs. His mouth had gotten hot inside even against the lingering pain. His cock was already half-hard. 

Troy didn’t know how to be alone. Sometimes when he tried, his body over-reacted. Again, there was Tyreen, just outside of the way he wanted to reach her.

They’d grown up reading enough Freud and Erikson. Neither of them ever said it out loud, but they understand they’d have sexual thoughts about each other. It was part of growing up, compounded by where and how that had happened to them. Troy wasn’t disgusted with himself over his. 

He was ashamed of wanting anything more from Tyreen. That made him clench his teeth, hold onto his next breath until his lungs burned. 

“Hell with it,” Troy muttered and unfastened his fly. 

He’d never gotten much body hair. A few dark wisps that crept down his jawbone and his crotch. He could touch out how damp and fragile his own skin was. Where his scars were mostly insensible, he had so damn much feeling between his legs. And a couple of stray siren markings— a dart on his left hip, a graze on the inside of his thigh and a trail of sketchy loops between the two. No one to try and kiss them tonight, though. People were as weird about that as they got with his empty shoulder, like they expected the red spaces carried some strange flavor.

Then again, there he lay, back to the Pandoran desert, stroking himself hard to the memory of his sister’s throat. He could change her to someone else if he liked: a boy bandit just as stringy as himself or a heavy-chested traveller from the Eden system, that throat full of richly-twisted syllables. But there wasn’t anybody to watch him either in the spaces of his own mind. Or at all.

He thought about kissing Tyreen since that was the clearest image, scent, touch he almost knew. 

Fuck, he was a sticky mess that night, dribbling precum with a heavy squeeze in his balls and this chapped sort of strain riding his shaft. It had been days since he’d gotten off, so it made enough sense if he turned needy with himself and the wreckage of his thoughts. 

Troy sighed. His cock bobbed close to his stomach. He tried again to turn himself to something, someone else. A pretty girl to lick his slippery slit, a firm hand to wash him down. He still kept seeing Tyreen’s sweaty face, the way her tongue flicked out when she coughed. He swore he felt her looking back at him, waiting to sneer, but instead clinging to a question. Had she ever even made that face? It was so perfect for kissing right on the mouth. Realizing that, he went at himself  _ hard _ , until his breath picked up and he could hear the rustle of his own skin clearer than anything in the night.

He didn’t rush it. He was too tired and sore, besides the niggling reminder that he’d get better tips if he lasted longer. He could have whatever he wanted from himself for a few minutes and leaking through his fingers.

Given the drift rising in his nerves, there came this weird distance between his awareness and his body, like he was listening to someone else catch their breath as the shudders skimmed up his spine. He pushed through his wet fingers. If he’d been asked, he might have said it sounded like he felt good. His mouth watered though, like there should have been something— skin slick through his teeth, altars or meat like Tyreen had given him the last two times she’d shared herself.

What he couldn’t hear was the sound of himself against her skin. That kiss was silent. Troy licked his lips. They had no taste either and they’d gotten dry again with him panting. He twitched in his grasp now, winding tighter onto himself. If he’d have had two hands, he might have pressed the other against his mouth, but he didn’t and he’d drawn up too close to let himself hesitate, pushing through his own grasp, hips scratching against the stone in spite of the bruise welling on his side.

What touch he did remember was (again) the sensation of her scars, her heat and her give. Would her mouth be like the outside or the slippery twinge where she’d broken on the bullet? Troy remembered the soft suck she’d made against him when he’d felt her that little bit too deeply, the scent and the sound of her open body, the flash of metal. 

That bullet was still inside of her. He hadn’t been brave enough to finger it out. Look at him, she’d begged him for this one thing and he hadn’t even tried, hadn’t put any part of himself or a pliers into her.

Except by what was mostly an accident. The sound was still gone, but she felt wet and soft in his memories, in his approximation of what taking the bullet from her would have felt like if he could have done it with his hand. She only cried a little this time. Her lips looked like she said… 

Troy got off, hard enough to leave a sting deep in his pelvis and drive his teeth in the split along his bottom lip. The first jot was gummy and thick. The next few spattered out between the tracks of his fingers, thinner and dewy. He could smell it, stale salt that poured out of him even after he stopped quivering inside. There was sperm streaked out of his reach down the stones where he lay and roped through the ends of the brush and the sand. 

He felt more wrung out than satisfied. His head was a bit of a blur. He tried to let go of his cock, but his legs shook and he leaked a few more drops onto his hand. 

Troy watched it drip from his forefinger to his middle. Before it reached his ring finger, he stuck his hand in his mouth and licked, even though most of what he tasted was himself, really. Not like he’d expected anything else.

Well. Part of him had expected his sister to call for him. She hadn’t.

Troy rested on his back, trying to take in the sensation of his body winding down, bask in the spermy mess he’d made out of his screwed up way of looking at the situation. But all of it, the scent and the silence and the sensation of his penis settling against his thigh. It all just reminded him.

He didn’t want to hear Tyreen’s voice ever again. He was going to go back to her the same way he always did. Nothing would be different besides where his bruises lay.

He got to his feet, little by little, woozy as though he’d been floating in water for too long. 

His feet didn’t hurt enough to bother him once he put any pressure on them. He zipped himself up and picked his way into the gash. He tried to get his hand dirty as he went. That might cover up the scent of sex. Then again, maybe she’d heard him. He wasn’t sure in that moment what noises he’d made and if she’d listened. Anyway, she wouldn’t pretend otherwise if she had. He’d just have to deal with that.

“Hey, Ty?” he said as he was coming up the stones. “I know you’re not doing so hot, but can I…?”

Talk to you. Kiss you. Pull the bullet out of your belly after all.

Troy shuddered at the thought or maybe one last stray gasp from his orgasm.

Tyreen sat in the middle of the gash. A moonbeam caught her like a spotlight. She had their long knife in one hand and a fistful of hair in the other. Her lap trickled with shaved off locks. Troy watched as she swiped off another. She made a thin whimper and started again, her movements slow and twitchy. 

“Ty! What the hell!” 

She didn’t startle when he said it. The tip of the knife dragged close to her neck. She faced him. Her concentration broke, though her movements wound on.

Troy slid over by small steps. He flexed his hand to make sure he was ready to snatch at her if things came to that.

Tyreen though let him close his fingers over hers. He hadn’t realized that was her marked hand holding the knife. There was nothing though, nothing for her to give him. Troy felt his own being try to blow back into her, but the opening sensation slammed closed so hard Troy tasted steel and blood instead of himself.

She let him take the knife. As the grip passed into his hand, she cried out.

Troy crouched and pulled his hand away so he could drop the knife behind him. Then he reached back for her. She was sticky with blood underneath the remains of her hair. He tipped his way in. This time, she jumped away, but he still caught her by the back of her neck and pressed his lips to her forehead. The one flash of pleasure he got from this smoked and went out. “Fuck, Ty! You’re burning up!”

Tyreen glanced around the gash as if she expected another presence there. She rubbed her shaking hand over the side of her head, tracing out the shear lines where her hair was gone. “I don’t… I don’t… know,” she murmured. It didn’t feel like it was him she was answering at all. When she looked him in the face the instant after, there were tears beading in her lashes. “I don’t know, Troy! I don’t know!”

“Stop it!” Troy shouted. “Seriously. Stop yelling. Stop it! You’re gonna…”

“Troy, please. It hurts.”

“OK, you can’t just…” She’d been doing better so he had to ask even if it sounded so absolutely stupid given her injury. Something else wasn’t right.

She tried. Her mouth wouldn’t work and she lost a little drool down her chin as she fought to tell him. Her lips were hot too when he brushed it away. 

“You gotta say what’s going on. Small words, OK? One at a time.”

“My head!” she screamed. “I told you! I kept telling you. I’m thirsty and it hurts! You’re not listening!” She slumped against him after, as if that had taken the last of her strength. 

Troy pressed his thumb over her mouth. “It hurts worse if you yell.”

“Dad’s not here,” Tyreen whispered against his skin.

“I know, OK. C’mon. Let’s get you back in bed.”

She didn’t move and honestly, part of him hadn’t been expecting she would. He had to ease her sideways, little by little until she got some idea and pushed with her boots. There was a bloody smear where she’d been sitting.

He’d deal with that later. For right then, he eased her down and blew the last few threads of her hair off of her neck. She scratched at herself after and again as he pulled the shirt up and unfastened her bandage.

The hemostatic sponges poking out of her belly were brownish red and hard now. The margin of her wound looked like a cigarette burn, even to the faint, warm halo he could feel through the clear dressing. That hadn’t leaked at all. One corner had started to peel. He figured he could tape that back down if things came to it.

But there wasn’t the big, reddened splotch he was expecting, not stripe markings, no thickness or heat in her lymph nodes, not at the juncture of her thighs or arcing over her uterus. The lower cluster absolutely should have been hot if she had an infection. Shouldn’t it? He pressed again. Tyreen moaned and he felt her pushing inside, ending on a shriek.

“What’s going on?”

Tyreen swiped at her forehead. She took a handful of shallow breaths. “I didn’t… I didn’t open the other bottle. I don’t… I’m thirsty…”

“Shh,” said Troy, stroking her side. He was really still trying to feel it— did stomach wounds not show infections the same way as limbs?

Was he supposed to unbandage her? Drain her and repack? He didn’t have any antibiotics. Just disinfectant that wasn’t indicated for internal use at all and some aspirin where he knew aspirin made her vomit uncontrollably if she swallowed even a little. 

He did have one thing though. “Here,” he said, reaching away from her and collecting the untouched bottle. He shook it so she could see the bubbles at the empty space beneath the cap. “You can have some water.”

It was too early, but what else did he have? He could comfort her at least a little, after all and after nothing. He didn’t want it to be nothing, but she looked so utterly gone there beside him.

“I couldn’t remember how to open it,” Tyreen whispered.

“That’s OK,” he assured, petting her one more time before he pulled away. “You know all the stuff I forget when I’m not doing too hot.”

“R-right.”

Troy pulled out the mug for his MRE set and sloshed in maybe a cup, then opened a fresh spoon. He dipped one scant mouthful and held it to her lips.

Tyreen closed her mouth around the bowl, like a child would have. He heard her suck before she let go, so there was almost no spit on the spoon after. Then she scrunched her face up, pressing her teeth together as hard as she could. The discomfort must have faded in a minute or two, and she weakly brought her hand up to the spoon.

“Let’s see if you can keep that down.” Troy said. He waited to give her another mouthful, his hand over top of the cup in case she lunged for it.

By the time he’d counted out five minutes, she was fussing at his side.

He gave her two spoonfuls that time, listening to her chew on the bowl after.

It must have taken an hour to give her the whole cup. Then she nodded off on his lap among the last curls of her hair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 7/28/2020.


	11. Chapter 11

He should have given her water sooner. They were in a damn desert. He’d denied her when he wasn’t even sure her intestines were ruptured.

That, or he’d just killed her. The water would spread the infection through her abdomen once it  _ leaked out _ . 

There had only ever been the barest chance he’d gotten her clean enough that she wouldn’t sicken. He’d been thinking though: sometimes in those pirate novels she liked so much, the old mates who’d gone soft and earned themselves torso wounds, they lived for a few days or weeks before fevers did them in. This was a real thing that happened. He’d read that too when Tyreen had gotten upset about a character having the nerve to exit the story that way. 

He’d been hoping he had that handful of time more than he’d been hoping for rescue. Rescued. On Pandora. Talk about wishful thinking. But Troy had still hoped. Now he picked over the bones of his options.

Where even was the bullet in her? It had gone in at a shallow angle, he knew that. Was it resting in her peritoneum or somewhere in her entrails? He didn’t think it had nicked her bowel. She’d already be dead if that was the case. Was her scar tissue that thick it had made any difference? There at the moment of impact or now when he touched her one more time to see if the heat had spread. It hadn’t. He didn’t  _ think  _ it had.

He wanted to tell himself the fever was from the gunpowder in her system, that the dehydration had made it spike. She felt cooler now between cups of water. But, it seemed like normally she would have shoved him off for fussing around so long under her bandages. It seemed like, and it didn’t happen no matter how many times he tried. 

So he tried. The sun came up. He realized he’d turned over the same questions for at least an hour. 

Troy shifted his sister back to the tent and laid down beside her. They were both scratchy with bits of her hair, but this way he could feel it if she tried to coax him awake but couldn’t speak. He watched her eyelids flutter for a while before his own slipped closed and he once again dreamed nothing.

He woke in a spume of screaming insects and Tyreen poking his chest.

“I want more water,” she said. 

At least she was making sense. Then again, when he offered her the cup, she glared at him until he went back for the spoon. Despite the heat, she also made herself at home on his lap for a second time. That was different too, but Troy wouldn’t have refused her even if she’d been fine. 

She struck him as some touchy half-asleep that wouldn’t quite break as she told him, “Head still hurts.”

Troy went to brush her hair out of her face. There wasn’t any need. “Is that why you tried to cut it off?” he asked, stroking her brow instead.

“Huh? No. That was those researcher creeps who tried to fuck you up, but they got me instead. Or you mean Mom?”

“No, I mean you,” said Troy. “Did you cut your hair because your head hurt?” He was going to tell her that made sense, because it did in a distinctly too-sick-to-think sort of way. He should know. He gave her another mouthful of water.

She sucked on the spoon. “I don’t remember cutting my hair. Stop thinking I’m stupid at me.” Finished, she shifted closer to lying on her back. 

Since he wasn’t doing so great keeping his head up, it meant they didn’t have much place to look besides each other. He touched her forehead again, testing her temperature on his wrist this time.

Tyreen wrinkled her nose. 

“Sorry. It was kinda a funny thing though, you know?”

“Funny how? Like  _ Twelfth Night _ ? Like  _ Dad _ cutting my hair and fucking it all up?” she asked seriously.

“No, more like…”

“Funny like what happened back…” She drew the forefinger of her marked hand around and around. 

“Back when?” Troy asked. 

Her dirty hand almost flitted into his mouth. Tyreen though looked him dizzily in the face and to tell him, “Back in Tull. The guy who fucked you said it was called Tull. I shook him down good before I let him take you, by the way.” 

“Ty, that’s really  _ not _ funny.” 

“Not the funny part. That’s just how I know somebody called it Tull. Hell if he was right. Seemed  _ off _ .” A shudder crept down her side and into her ankles when she sighed.

“So, what’s…?”

Her words clipped along. “He fucked you kinda mean, didn’t he? Stuck his cock right in and  _ blammo _ .” She slammed her fist into her opposite palm when she said that. “Bet you got off anyway. You kinda like it rough, right?” 

“OK, now you’re being shitty.”

Tyreen shrugged. She reached for the spoon, but her fingers closed on empty air. “Oh, well, excuse me for dying.”

“You’re not…” Troy started to put her at ease. Or maybe that was himself. The fear that welled in him after didn’t run off of the skin of his heart like what he’d felt when she’d been shot. This wasn’t cut with adrenaline. It wasn’t clean, wasn’t sharp. It just was.

_ You’re not dying. _ But what if she was? What if there was no if? Because there wasn’t. He could tell himself all through the next night. It wouldn’t change a damn thing. 

Troy fixed his fingers against his temple. A drip of water from the underside of the spoon, or maybe it was her spit, ran down his cheek, evaporating before it brushed his chin.

Tyreen gestured that she wanted more. Before he could get it for her, she said, “You wanna know what  _ I _ did in Tull? That’s the funny part.” 

Troy said, “Not really.”

That left her blinking at him. “Huh?”

“Just making sure you were still listening,” he said. He was struggling to keep his voice any shade of even. “What did you and your silly face do? Kill everybody?”

“Kinda. Where’d you think I got all those ECHO parts?”

Everything slid together in Troy’s mind the way a summer storm broke in trickles of thunder and a slow smoke of rain off of coral and stone. The cool shock even choked him quiet like the sudden humidity would have. There was still that waiting underneath it all. What if we get blown away? What if there is no  _ if _ ?

_ Blood for blood! _ The bandits had said.

Tyreen talked, a grin shaking on her lips. “Yeah, after I got done scoping out your trick, ran into a buncha those Neuron Spectres or whatevers who were hanging out around a literal trash fire. I was all, ‘Hey guys, who’s got a smoke? I wanna get so high I don’t know what my name is.’” She paused to laugh, to shoot him a look. She seemed confused he hadn’t joined her. “‘cause right now, I don’t. Right? I still don’t.” That jibe she passed right through and into the next. “Couple of ‘em were like ‘Who’s this little bitch?’ but they didn’t argue so much once I showed ‘em my gun.”

“That’s… I would have…” His jaw muscles were so tight he could hear them shivering more than he could make out the words. 

“I wanted to get it myself. Wasn’t going so bad until the one grabbed my tits and his hand fell off.” Tyreen shoved her palm up her shirt to demonstrate. It pulled the material all askew over her bandages and her scars. Her skin made a damp suck against her palm.

He thought of her offering her breasts to him in the bathhouse. The image flashed across his mind, something trying put out the truth: there was no losing a hand to his sister. People, lucernae, real flowers— they all withered in total before her. 

She kept talking. “Whew. That was a trip. I think I might actually get fucked up on my own and instead I end up on my ass and there’s no Acapulco Gold as far as I can see. Pretty lame. Nevermind I mighta just let him do me if that, you know, worked. He had pretty hands for a whackjob.” 

“You didn’t try to trade yourself for a smoke!” Troy burst out. “You’re making shit up!”

“Maybe I wanted somebody to talk to while you were getting your ass stuffed.”

“How many?”

“Huh? Oh, right. Six or seven. Talk about a food coma.”

Troy swallowed. He remembered the taste of meat. Somewhere in his instincts, his hand went to his mouth. Not that he had anything left of the bandits to vomit up or that he could have in the first place when all he’d gotten of them was their essence. 

“It felt so good,” said Tyreen. “I was almost full. I think. I dunno, it didn’t last long. Gone before I ever fed you.”

“You killed  _ six _ .”

“I’ve killed a lot more’n that, Bro.” She turned a crooked look of amusement up at him. “And like, you too? You mad you didn’t get to watch? The one that went at me died making a real stupid face.” She demonstrated, an obscene and spitty take on cunniligus, one that left her gasping with laughter and holding her side. “Oh, and then one of the ones who ran fucking shot me. The nerve.”

Troy moved his palm over her mouth instead. His jaw squeezed. She still had her hand up her shirt and she was still kind of snickering, like she couldn’t see the pain in his face. But maybe she couldn’t, lying there all busted up on his lap, telling him the reason why he felt like every seam and sinew in his body felt ready to snap. Was her. The one person who could fix him.

He wanted to tell her  _ he  _ was sorry. He didn’t even know why.

Troy pushed her off of him and got to his feet. “Not… Not right now,” he managed to get out.

He was a long time waiting for another sound. Or it seemed that way, with his sense of himself locking up so tight.

“Why not right now? I’m not a corpse yet. Mom is though. So, since you let me have a rant, maybe you could talk about…”

“Not right now,” he repeated. He took one step forward and then another. 

“Yeah, just walk away again,” Tyreen sounded motherly, the way she put that. Motherly and disappointed.

Unnerved, Troy got sloppy about what he told her next. “I woulda worked extra, you know,” he stammered. “I woulda brought those two assholes back with me so you had something to eat. Fuck, I’da let you watch and then eat them. Wouldn’t be the first time you saw me get off!”

“You neither. And that would have made eight. Or nine. Hey, it was a scene. I didn’t count.”

She was saying there was nothing he could have done to stop her.

Well, that cut both ways.

Troy walked out of the gash, hunched over with his hands in his pockets, staggering on the disappointment that she didn’t call after him this time.

It was like she expected him to go. 

So what had he done but stumble to the feet of the deer corpse and play right into her hands and remember he’d been thinking of digging them both a grave a day or two ago?

He could still do that. He looked back, thinking as much. He opened his mouth to tell her. Realizing he didn’t have the perfect words, he left things with none.

No, that wasn’t true. He knew exactly what he would have said— the thing Tyreen never answered when he brought it up. Well, the one that wasn’t about their mother.

Not  _ really _ . Well, maybe ‘I love you’ was part of their mother to her and maybe none of their shit mattered outside of his own head anyway. 

He saw her on the edge of his lips: as she had been in the bathhouse, as she’d bitten him, as he wished her eyes would shine if he could feed her back, but that wasn’t happening now and it certainly never had before.

He scratched his head in the same place she’d shaved hers, drawing his fingers down his neck after.

The dead deer once more broke his field of vision. Something had already eaten its eyes and its tongue and some of the meat out of its spine.

Troy bent over the body. In his shadow, the luminescent algae still glowed, but it went out slowly in the oil from his hand when he touched the animal’s markings. His own gleamed briefly.

He wasn’t dead yet. 

Troy grabbed the deer by its lashed forefeet and he dragged it out of the way. One of its leg bones jabbed out, rattling as he walked, and then again as the body fell over. He went back to the wells, unfastened one tube and drank. The water was slick and peppery.

He made himself try to think. How did that memory in the bathhouse end? He’d been too sick for the instance to settle in his brain. It might not have even really happened, even as clear as Tyreen’s smell and taste and nearness and fingers on his neck. He thought he heard her gasp as he folded his lips against her nipple. After the night before, the sensation of her recollected voice struck him as strange. 

She’d told him to stop. Probably. Something like that.

He stood and he listened for her now, but there was nothing. There was just nothing. Everything he’d done was a waste.

His sister was dying. 

His cruel, selfish sister.

His cunning, mercurial sister.

His  _ home _ .

Troy took a deep, shuddering breath. He held his hand to mouth again to make himself swallow. His fingers smelled of decay even though he hadn’t exactly touched the deer. Fuck. Was that her? Had he gotten that smell off of  _ her _ ?

He spit the water out into his hand and raked his wet fingers over his face.

He didn’t have time for this. He couldn’t help her if he died first. She wasn’t getting better if she didn’t eat. 

He needed something smaller, like skag pup, to get her started. He could haul that up the slope to the gash. She’d come around like she had with the water. He’d be able to bring her down for something bigger after that. Maybe another one of those scraggly deer.

That was what he felt sorry about: his miscalculation. 

He shook himself out as he stood. It took his eyes a distressing handful of moments to focus, then and again as he pulled his mask on. The polarization in the lenses seemed to vibrate as he walked. He checked his own pulse to see what it was doing. All he found was a faint fever on his skin. The space behind his ears always got damn hot when he ran one. Knowing he’d come into one too, he let himself feel that other thing that had been creeping up his senses since the night before.

The thing that let him live fought to close itself off. It screwed and waited there, all giddy and fleeting and the courageous kind of intoxicating. 

It’d been a while since he’d shut in so far. How weirdly determined he became when there was nothing but smoke left in his veins. It hurt, surely as his body wearing down around him in the throes of his exhaustion, but it hurt  _ good  _ now that he was down in it.

He could still do this. He’d drain the wells. He’d drag Tyreen another ten miles, twenty miles, however long it ended up being, over the highway until they fell into the arms of some settlement or stranger. They’d be leap-frogging between patches of shade, weighing the need to rest against the fact they were stranded in one of the toothiest deserts in the Milky Way, but they’d do it. Fuck, they’d come here on a dream and a star chart so old it made their film map look new.

The whole thing sounded mad against the biting silence. Troy recognized that, but he also dragged himself forward and towards it.

He  _ was  _ going to feed Tyreen. She’d have to deal with things being backwards a while longer. It wouldn’t be forever. Somewhere that ended and the desert did too. 

Troy threw himself further down the road. He could not feel the hammer of his footsteps in his legs. He wanted to keep his mind on the tasks hovering in his next handful of hours. There was still that fear lying soft underneath his elation. He tried to drive it away with the image of the pump in the bathhouse.

In his daydream drunk mind, that wouldn’t come to him.

He was in a hot day somewhere else. He had an aerox on the end of a wire. He’d cut the incendiary glands out. One of the gloves he’d used to do it was starting to smoke. He’d been sloppy. The aerox still had some lift. It hissed an inch off of the ground, sniffing at the singe. “I hate this.” Troy gasped.

A hand brushed his whole shoulder. 

Typhon DeLeon had come up on him without a sound. He was weirdly good at that. 

Troy sighed. He glanced back only at some strain of his sister’s voice elsewhere in their dwelling.

He and his father looked towards each other though. Towards and through and past, not really to. Troy halfway understood his father had a faint smile to him, but that was a usual thing.

“Hey, don’t cry. You’re a big boy,” said Dad.

Troy swallowed. Again, he didn’t remember the context, only that he was holding something back and it wasn’t about what he said next. “You let her cry all she wants.” He’d wanted to say  _ I’m not a boy _ . But not even Mama had listened to that.

“Well, that’s just not true.” Dad laughed. “Your sister  _ doesn’t  _ cry anymore. If she did, she’s a girl who lost her mother and you’re…”

“You hate me, don’t you?” It slipped out as gentle as if he’d been the one to confess anything.

Dad’s expression had fallen the same way it did when he caught himself talking about Mama. Happy Wife, Happy Life. Happy’s not happening if she’s gone. “Don’t talk like that. It’s almost dinnertime.” He pulled his hand away. “And don’t cry either.” Then he turned and walked back into the homestead.

Troy was expected to follow. He was expected to say, “Then storytime?”, which he did.

“Well, alright, I guess.”

The aerox cried, circling his boots.

Somewhere on the sunlight span of the atrium, Tyreen cut her way into the conversation. “I want the one about Gilgamesh making moon eyes at Enkidu in the dress!”

“Not anything your old man was up to? I’m hurt.”

Troy paused, his steps and his heartbeat it felt like. He pulled the mask off and he spit. Shadows changed quickly around him in the hot Pandoran sun. They seemed so big, as though noon had passed and last he’d known it was barely morning.

“Quite a show you put on last night.” The voice came from somewhere vaguely off to his left.

Troy canted half a smile. He walked right up to the person who’d risen off the highway like a ghost. He’d half-thought he mustn’t be seeing them. Their cloak was so white, but up close he could make out the tatters at the hem, the outline of the pistol at their hip. When he shifted for a better look at the last, they obligingly pulled their arm back and showed him. “Jakobs,” he said, pointing. “My dad likes those.”

“Right, right.” They nodded. Their golden stubble flashed. “And you’ve got a Vladoff and I’ve never managed to kill one of those whatever-they-ares, but here you did.”

“Deer. They’re deer. I think. Trade you to use your ECHO. Not my gun though.”

“ECHO?” The person took a step back, a look of disgust forming on their features. They had such pale eyebrows they were hard to track in the sunlight. “I don’t work for Dahl. Hell of a way to greet somebody out here, by the way.” 

“OK. How about a radio? I need to call out.”

“There’s something weird about the way you talk.” That got them starting at their hand, then snapping their fingers. “Wait. Are you a woman?”

“I’m a guy. It’s complicated.”

“Mm, I see. And then here, you’re almost long enough to have been a ‘deer’ too. Are you real?”

Troy patted himself on his empty shoulder. He thought it was pretty funny they’d mistaken one another for mirages. “I think so,” he said though.

“You hear her calling too?” How tentative their voice turned. In that moment, they started to pull away. But they didn’t finish. It reminded him of the deer, actually. Well, no wonder this person hadn’t ever caught one.

“No. I’m too tired.” Troy shook his head. He paused, trying to draw out what he was thinking. The haze in his head was making it hard. “Look, I need to talk to somebody,” he tried. 

The person turned their back to him, but they waved after him when he didn’t follow their first few steps. “Come back to camp with me. Maybe we can work something out.”

Troy stumbled after them. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 7/28/2020.


	12. Chapter 12

Everything in the hermit’s camp was the same as their cloak— clean white or silver, but tattered. Even their supply chest had been whitewashed at one point, though they hadn’t rigged a shelter besides a sail of translucent polymer that might have once been part of an aircraft. 

He and they sat by a solar-powered stovetop, eating a can of chilli “Ethiopian style” with their fingers. The meat was soft and savory and the bread the hermit had made chewy, laced with insect legs.

Troy had eaten plenty of insects and he didn’t mind. 

He still needed unfastened down to the thinnest inches of his nerves. Given that, he hadn’t realized his hunger or that he’d started to miss conversation with other people. Still, he couldn’t say he was suffering, sitting there with the hermit, eating out of the same tin and watching the clouds roll in.

“Animal scales. That’s what they look like,” Troy said.

The hermit nodded. “I was thinking cervical cancer. Aren’t you an optimistic one?”

Troy almost asked where the hell that had come from, but it wasn’t his business. He chose to leave the last of their supper to his host, who was eyeing the remains. He gestured for them to eat.

It surprised him that they split the difference, taking most of the flatbread for their own with a bit of the sauce and offering Troy the rest of the chilli. Troy used the burnt edge of his bread to scrape out the remains. He had to pin the can between his knees to clean the corners and that singed his pants. Then he popped the bread in his mouth.

“How French,” said the hermit.

“No, I’m just hungry,” Troy parted his legs and dropped the can and set that aside on the tin bread platter. “So it goes,” he muttered. 

The light on the heater went out. The hermit came what might have been uncomfortably close, but Troy didn’t realize it was happening until it already had. Besides, the hermit smelled nice— sweaty, but a bit like limes. They ran their thumb along his cheek. “Why does anything go?”

“Dunno. I’m just tired. And my sister…” He stopped talking before anybody laid their hand across his mouth. 

“It’s alright,” said the hermit. “You’re alright. You’re a good boy, trying to do the right thing. Like the rest of us in the light of the Christ Child.”

“Right.” he leaned back as their fingers stole over his Adam’s apple. His throat was slick and he didn’t know why. He thought he’d eaten neatly and it wasn’t that hot in the shade. 

“You keep saying ‘my sister’ this and ‘my sister’ that, but not finishing. Haven’t you had enough to drink or did Mother Mary come to you?”

“Kinda thirsty,” Troy admitted. “No Mary. Just Ty. Just her and me.”

“Not me and her?”

“Her favorite book’s  _ Cat’s Cradle _ , speaking of Vonnegut, and she snorts when she laughs and she’s a crack shot but she doesn’t drive so good. Wrecked the shit out of our ship. And I taught her how to pee standing up, but she never said thank you.” It was funny in that moment, trying to cram her into the smallness of words. He didn’t mean to be laughing, but there he definitely was, imagining what Tyreen would have thought if she’d heard him.

The hermit looked on, stern, but not unkind. By and by, they tired of watching Troy snicker at himself, and moved off to grab a canteen from one of the stones they were using as shelves. They took one swallow, then another, and finally slunk back across the ground. 

Troy started to try and explain. He didn’t get very far. His mouth was suddenly filled with water and kiss.

“Better?” asked the hermit.

Troy nodded, licking his wet lips. “I’m bleeding. Hope you don’t mind. Maybe shoulda said something.”

“No, no, that’s fine. It’ll give it some flavor.”

“To be clear here, I’m trading you me for your radio or something. My sister’s not doing so great. Could use some help besides Jesus. No offense.”

“None taken,” the hermit assured him, holding another swallow which got pushed into Troy much the same way, to the breath of citrus, scrape of golden whiskers on his cheek. “I have money too. I doubt that’s of use to either of us, though.”

Troy reached up to run his fingers over their rough cheeks. “What even is that stuff? Numbers on a chip. Maybe I want something with more flavor too.”

The hermit nodded, leaning into his touch. Their gaze brushed against his shoulder, the empty one. 

He could taste them longing for that space, about the same as he’d tasted their water. 

“It’s like your soul if your soul was something you could show other people,” they said.

“Makes my soul empty, I guess. ‘cause I’m broke as shit.”

“Yes.”

“So, it’s you, me, this base body.” And talking. The sensation of talking to someone who wasn’t Tyreen; of not worrying that he might turn home _ less _ at the last twist of things. “And what’s the matter in the face of eternity?”

The next kiss came without water. It was at once lighter and much deeper than the others. The stubble hurt so good on Troy’s skin. “You’re well-spoken,” said the hermit, fumbling over the cheek he’d scratched up, then down Troy’s throat again and with purpose. “But so thin. I usually like more meat on my boys.”

“Like I said. I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little strategems.”

“ _ Her _ again. Ah, you’re silly.” A flicker of doubt crossed the words. “And you really are a boy? Not teasing this poor, old soul?”

“Yeah. I’m a boy.”

“Let me see.” 

Troy reached down, meaning to undo his fly. 

The hermit laid a hand between their mouths, wiping their lips or covering their expressions or some part of those things.

Troy though felt his own hand on Tyreen not that long ago. He stopped short of pulling himself out of his fly and breathed; drank in this complication of his memory. He had the tie at his waist half-undone the whole time.

The hermit met his eyes once more as he stood. He didn’t think they noticed he was shaky on his feet. 

Troy undressed, sliding out of his boots and letting his bandages wash away in the dust. Then there was the matter of his shirt. He paused without, hand pressed to his scar. The gesture at once showed off his markings and hid the place where his arm should have been, where he was still thinking of that man back in Tull wanting to finger him.

The hermit circled, peering this way and that over his body as if trying to draw a bead. Their interest extended past his missing arm. They trailed one finger down his spine and rubbed his bruised jaw. Eventually, they did press on his hand to get a look at his shoulder, but they seemed more interested in the collarbone he did have rather than anything he didn’t, nipping their way back up to his neck from there.

While they were occupied, Troy pushed his pants down along with his shorts. That way they had to come around to see him, soft and more grimy than he wanted to think about. 

A serpentine sort of half-smile took their lips as they stood back. “Heavens. What happened to you?” Curiosity cast a hush over their voice.

“I was born this way,” said Troy.

“How very strange. But I’ve already thought of something to do with your strangeness.” The hermit licked their finger, raising it as if testing the direction of the wind. Troy expected it would end up somewhere on his skin. Instead they held it out to him.

He leaned in for a nip and they pulled his bottom lip out, feeling there for the wound they’d already tasted. Next they had bitten him there and the two of them were kissing again, Troy hunched over their frame. They laid hands to him, feeling out his belly and his back, the bruise the deer had left him. The last made him gasp, but he didn’t pull away. The fresh pain in the mark was grounding. 

They shushed him and took Troy’s hand in theirs, leading him around to their hip and the holster and their pretty Jakobs pistol. Troy could feel the grip was leather, old but well-cared-for. They closed his fingers and drew it out. Troy tensed. It was such a strange motion. But together, they twisted the thing open and spilled the bullets onto the gravel. 

“Do you like it?” asked the hermit.

“I do. Think I’d like your other gun better though, if you catch my drift.” Usually tricks liked a little innuendo, but there came a hesitation between them and then the pistol pointing up at the soft part of Troy’s neck. He smiled. The thing was empty, nothing in the chamber. He could tell by the way the tip of the barrel danced in the hermit’s hand when they breathed.

“Right, right. Safe as milk. See?” they said. “Unlike my penis, which is pure spirit, you understand.”

Well, this had gotten interesting. Blood bloomed in Troy’s loins for the first since the hermit began toying with him. What would they be asking him for? The question made his mouth water. He leaned forward and wrapped his lips around the barrel, letting it clink on his teeth. That should count for yes.

“I’d like to put this in you and have you watch. I’d like to see all of this myself and call you mine when I’m done,” they explained.

Troy pulled off of the gun with a wet smack. “Alright. There’s condoms in one of my pockets.”

The hermit nodded, patting his cheek as they drew away. Troy recovered several mostly OK condoms. He wasn’t as worried about pinholes or rub marks as he was the lube still being good. The hermit’s gun was one of the older models, its blued barrel sporting a heavy off underside that turned thicker towards the grip. It was smooth, but it was big. Troy figured he could take it. The thought warmed him all the more.

Then there he was, laughing again as the hermit pulled him onto his lap. There was such a size difference between the two of them that they only came up to the eye of his markings. Still, they insisted on the lap part of their proposition, or rather Troy sitting between their legs. With no real mirror, they watched themselves and one another in a polished piece of polymer sheeting, their colors washed out like a badly balanced video. Troy could hardly see his markings, but the bruise showed up when they drew their pale fingers over him. They bit him besides, humming when they did. 

Troy liked their sharpness, the way it matched with the curious fact he couldn’t tell anything from the weight of their crotch against him. They seemed to be blank as a doll. Well, some people were into that and others born that way. Shoving the gun into his mouth clearly brought them pleasure. They didn’t grind on him or even touch him any different, but there were catches to their breath and this sense of urgency to their movements. 

He let the hermit spread his legs, set to him with their spitty fingers.

“Have you ever seen inside of yourself?” they asked.

Troy had to wait for them to pull the pistol out of his mouth. “Not like this.” He knew very well what his heart and the stringy edges of his bones looked like; that his back wasn’t quite straight, all thoughts that slipped away as the hermit’s fingers bit into him. It wasn’t that his body resisted or that they tried to take too much of him in one shot. The sting of penetration matched with a surge of need he hadn’t been expecting. Troy whined, but he leaned back, inviting them to show him, which they did, once they’d each spit on their fingers again. 

Past the darker skin of his hole, he was reddish and tender-looking. He’d expected as much. It didn’t turn him on. That was the thought of the gun. 

The hermit made a show of rolling the condom down the barrel, sure Troy watched them do it. They fingered him once more, stretching him to a moan before they put the muzzle to him. Troy took a deep breath. They pushed into him hard and slow. The pressure took his breath away for the first few finger widths and he had to squirm to straighten his hips out to make enough room. By the time the hermit decided that was far enough, he was panting and straining inside, painfully aware of how hard the gun was compared to a cock.

But the metal was cool and that thrilled him down in the deepest places of his spine.

“You’re going a bit soft,” the hermit remarked, though they didn’t sound disappointed.

“It’s fine,” Troy said and grinned at them over his shoulder. “Give it to me.”

The gun hurt, but the hermit went harder on Troy’s word. Somehow that got him hard and wet as he’d been the night before. 

Troy gave himself a few small strokes, over his stomach and his cock. At least he played the scene that way for the mirror. The hermit didn’t stop him, but the hermit also didn’t accept his salty fingers when he brought them up for them to lick. 

They fucked him. That was weirdly liberating in the moment. He didn’t have to feel anything besides himself, even if that self was squeezing apart at the seams. But there really was this sense of  _ being  _ in his body when the grip brushed up against him on one thrust and then another. He’d taken the whole damn thing and now he was flashing inside even if that was something that happened with a faint brush of pain.  _ Fuck _ — when they got him on his sweet spot with that muzzle.

The first drop of blood didn’t surprise him. The hermit, they ended up leaving the pistol in him, nudging rather than thrusting, waiting for him to say something, do something. Troy leaned back and did his best to spread himself, even though that changed the angle of the barrel inside of him and he was that hot up through his tip that he groaned at the shift. “No, it’s OK. I knew this was coming. I still want it.”

“Such a good boy,” said the hermit.

Troy knew he wasn’t a boy, but he smiled and he let them have that, let them have him all the harder and all over again. It was the in and out pressure that was getting him, the thick part of the stock meeting his skin and then letting him sink back to normal as the next thrust waited behind the withdrawal. He’d stopped gasping when they pushed in, but the weight of his arousal made his cock hurt, the same as his wounded feet. At the same time he wanted it, wanted that gun.

Maybe he did like it rough as long as rough was on some shade of his terms.

He felt at once like he had lost his bones and like he wasn’t anything but a twisted, solid mass of those. His hearing and his vision went dim as his orgasm laid hold of him. He had a vague sense of his lips working, but most of what he knew in that was the spasms that had him for a long and weightless while.

Troy came all over himself, five or six thick jots that ran down his thighs and his stray markings. He slid out of that panting, unable to rub them away. They felt good too, in their own way. Good and violently sticky.

The hermit took the barrel from him. They pulled the condom off of the pistol. It was still slick-shined with lube beneath, but their spit followed since apparently they would rather have that than Troy in their mouth.

He considered soliciting for a lick himself. 

As he turned to them, they asked, “Ah, well that’s done then. Now— wouldn’t you rather have something a bit more material than words or money?”

Troy’s eyes narrowed. He hung on their point for a few breaths before he said anything, not quite sure of what he’d heard. “You said I could call out.”

“And you did call out, quite a lot, didn’t you?” They laughed low, like they were trying to hide it even with their skin against his.

He breathed.

The nail of their forefinger bit against his neck. It should have been a kiss in that place. 

Matched with what they had said, a jolt of rage cut through Troy. He made to squirm away. Instead, he got shoved to the side. 

The hermit had muscles beneath their fuzzy skin, besides the perfect angle to seize him. He was compromised, striking back as they took him on his right. With the two of them facing the same way, it put their better hand at his bad side. Troy tried to fight his way to his feet. 

The mirror crashed over. A bottle clicked into his mouth. An open one. “Then drink up, boy.”

Something hot and slick with alcohol coursed into him. The bottle ended up so far into his mouth he couldn’t force it out without risking the glass breaking. Spitting would have sent the liquor up his nose. It was strong stuff that made his insides lurch and a flush spread through his skin. He couldn’t close his throat. It hurt too much. It felt too good. 

“That’s more worth your while.”

His tongue went numb as the glass slipped away. His head swam and he struggled for air between his coughs. Everything was so hot. The booze hitting his empty stomach made love to the fact he was already drunk with himself. His bloody spit came in gouts and then there was this hand over his cock, stroking gently as the bottle lolled between his legs; he could see glass glinting in the corners of his vision as he turned to the sickle scale clouds and he was still trying so hard to breathe. The thing of it, the thing of all of it, being that Troy DeLeon felt amazing. Besides the sandy twinge of soreness in his throat, he came down in hot, slippery pleasure.

He wanted to close his eyes, but that sliver of the sky sliding past his vision was so… it reminded him of something… something outside of himself… 

The hermit kissed and kissed him, until he was swimming in their lips and their taste and the vague sensation he was so drunk that maybe he could get them drunk too.

They said, “I know most children get started early with the psycho thing these days, but you’re too pretty for that. The Christ Child and I will keep you here,” the hermit told the curve of his throat, again with their finger.

Troy tried to say  _ I’m not _ , but he could not protest. He was slavering too much. 

“That bit about your sister? Ridiculous. Tell me you want it to rain blood and you’ll be fine. No one here will judge you. That’s God’s work, you know.”

Troy saw Tyreen’s teeth in his skin, felt her warmth on his back, smelled her resting against him in the morning. Which morning, he couldn’t have said.

He didn’t rear at the hermit. He didn’t even really fight him.

He leaned over and he forced himself to remember all those nights back on Nekrotafeyo where he’d been so sick. It didn’t bother him when he puked. It stung. That was all. Whatever had been in the bottle tasted like bleach coming back up.

The hermit hesitated at his sudden retching.

Troy didn’t come back to himself right off, but he knew that opening for what it was. He dragged his hand out from under their grasp. The bottle snapped apart so easy on the side of their head. It didn’t do more than drag out their stun and throw thin, blue gleams scattering between them the glass came down.

Troy gave them one last sultry look. Their hand had slid to his thigh, so he pinched his legs together before he stuck them underneath the ribs with the broken plunge of the bottle. Bits of it snapped and shattered as he swiped it to the side. One point grated on their ribs. More came off in the wound and their blood ran thick with dribbles of fat as the gash opened.

The sudden gape in their insides surprised them more than the part where Troy jabbed the remains of the bottle deep up inside of them. Something there snapped. They finally started screaming, collapsing in a wet and struggling mass.

Troy cracked them in the face. The blow left him faintly dizzy too, but no worse than he’d felt coming out of the booze and the sex and the daydreams unravelling around him.

Again, he didn’t feel himself move, but he was crouching with one foot on their neck, naked and still somewhat hard despite his orgasm, vomit dribbling down his chin and cum streaking his thighs.

They looked up at him. Their chest shimmered when they breathed. 

“My sister’s not real?” Troy said calmly. “Our mother spent five surgeries cutting out pieces of her stuck inside of me because they wouldn’t stop growing back.”

Despite the spatter of their next breath, the hermit nodded.

Troy struck them in the temple for good measure. A fragment of glass dropped into their eye. 

He himself spit before he stood, eyeing them closely as he did. They might still struggle. 

_ And I was the parasite. _

All they did was bleed more, just like his sister had when he’d tried looking into her. It was kind of fascinating to watch from his drunken, dragging side of things. The gunk spreading with their injury, bubbles and flecks of brightness, air and spain— was this something Tyreen knew when she ate? When she suffered? He wondered. Then he shook himself out, taking their Jakobs for himself.

_ She’s always been…  _

He held the gun the whole time he dressed. One of the bullets kicked out under his boot. He took this and spun it up in the chamber, choosing to level that at the remains of the hermit rather than his own weapon, which had, he noticed, had rested not two yards off the whole time. 

_ She’s always been part of me. _

What an idiot. Troy laughed and licked his lips. They were bitter, but the hermit had plenty more water and Troy drank like a glutton before he untied the bindings for the sail over the camp. The polymer had been there so long that it stayed hanging in the shining in the dregs of the afternoon even with a fastener and a half gone. The rope was stiff and old, but it more than did for Troy’s purposes.

_ I always wanted to be part of her too. _

The hermit tried to say something, maybe  _ don’t hurt me _ . Maybe  _ I forgive you _ . Troy tied their hands over their head. “So, we’re taking a little trip,” he said. “We’re going to see my sister. She’s the best.”

_ So hey, I got what I wanted. _

The camp was due west of where he’d come across the deer. He shouldn’t have too much trouble finding his way back. The guns posed more of an issue. Carrying two in his waistband left things awfully tight and the Jakobs bit into his hips. The hermit wasn’t too bad to drag, once he got them down to the road. They yelped when he passed over the jagged places in the pavement though.

_ And now that’s all there is. _

He could have shot this person and been done with them. He could still. He was armed for it. But, he could have broken that aerox’s back too. He could have let Tyreen rot in her hubris. But he didn’t.

He went back to her that one more time.

The booze made the walk hurt less, though Troy was fiercely tired by the time he reached the gash. The dreamy softness rising in him had spread so airy thin that he was all but laughing as he scrabbled his way up the stones and into the last of this one shot of light that crossed the rose bushes at that hour.

No wonder she’d covered his eyes when he was trying to sleep the other day.

And speaking of  _ her _ — Tyreen’s hand closed on the tie for the tent. She lifted it and peered out.

In the sudden glare, Troy couldn’t make out much of her expression. “Hey,” he said. “I don’t know if this’ll make it better, but it’s still breathing.” 

He hauled the hermit to the center of the gash. They were down to dust and blood and fear. One of their shoulders had come undone.

He reached for Tyreen once he’d dropped the ropes. 

She said, “It’s pretty. Glad you didn’t put it in my bed though.” A shimmer of her old self crossed the words.

She was also bloody down to her knees there as he carried her over to kneel by the body. She still held herself as much as a queen as a swaying sick-person possibly could.

The hermit lifted their head.

Troy waved down at them. “I told you I had a sister,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 7/28/2020.


	13. Chapter 13

After she ate the hermit, Tyreen lay beside the husk, smiling, sweating and food drunk; not paying the slightest attention to anything besides herself as Troy broke down the camp. 

He was trying to let her digest, or unfurl— something like that. They had spent their whole lives together, and there he was, unsure if she experienced leeching and feeding at all like he did. She always gave the bullshittiest answers about it when he asked. And it had been years since he’d asked.

He was tempted to again though, watching her doze. She might be unguarded enough to tell him something like the truth, but he’d have to wake her to get it. He was trying to let her sleep as much as she wanted since that might still do her some good.

By and by, she shifted, her back arching. He thought it might have been an autonomic response held somewhere in her rest until she opened her eyes and she held out her marked hand. “Hey, Bro. I didn’t feed you, did I?”

He sighed, and he put on a smile as he turned to her. “You kinda didn’t.” Troy knelt and he offered her his touch.

She grabbed him. His share of the hermit’s life tasted like meat, but there was something wine-edged and gamey to them, a sharpness that made his hair stand on end and his own markings twist in fiber optic brightness. Troy spread like a flower sucking down sunshine. It happened somewhere deep in his belly. Everything stopped hurting except for the soles of his feet. 

Tyreen nodded knowingly, then put her head back down.

He hesitated beside her. What would it matter if he checked her forehead one last time? They were past worrying about little things like that, but Troy caught himself nonetheless, resting his hand on her brow. His fingers slipped over her eyes.

She said to him across the sunset, “Nice Jakobs you got there. Take it off my dinner?”

“Kinda did,” Troy admitted. “Didn’t fight me much. Don’t think they wanted it.”

“What a dumbass,” said Tyreen. She rolled over and she moaned. 

He let her go and remade the travois even though the knots left his fingers bleeding. The rope was old and his skin worn thin, but he got it together. He loaded what little they had and then went back to his sister. 

As he dragged her onto the frame, she said, “Troy, I don’t feel good,” her head tipping into the crook of his arm.

“I know you don’t,” he offered. “It won’t be much longer. I promise.” Troy sashed her in place with his belt. His pants were so stiff with dirt he didn’t need it anymore. Besides, the guns helped, pinning the waist up and probably making a wreck of the fabric. 

The two of them rattled out of the gash and down to the wells. For all the work he’d spent on them, they came apart simply, all folding and yanking. They left a scar in the hardpan though. He took one basin and gave Tyreen another. The third he poured into the empty water bottle.

He drank himself to sated bliss. Tyreen sipped slowly, the way she did when she was unsure if she was about to throw up. She finished too though, and then lay there, holding her stomach.

“Is it hurting again?” Troy asked, quietly so she could pretend to ignore him if she liked.

“Everything feels really wrong, Troy. Everything.”

He nodded and he reached out to her. He meant to take her basin so he could fold it back up.

She shifted when he did. She might have been handing the thing back to him. There they paused though, him kneeling at her hips, her watching him. He almost thought he’d lost her right there, the sudden way she sank out of his attention, but she made one of her sleepy manta whistles as she settled.

Troy checked over their gear and grabbed the travois. In the very last of the daylight, the paint along the highway bones hung on bright for a slow-seething while. Then it was gone, invisible against the dusk. 

Troy put his head down and he thought about coming close to the desert, not just driving or watching or waiting, but of being there. The whole world moved around them, footfall after footfall and southward winding through the edges of his remaining awareness. He had to admit, he was in the perfect frame of mind to do this. Everything seemed so  _ obvious _ , down to the voice behind him.

“I just wanted to be happy for five minutes,” said Tyreen. “I wanted to listen to music with my little brother and I wanted to come like a real girl and I wanted to go on an adventure. Now look at me.”

Troy didn’t answer. She’d been saying his name when she wanted him and she hadn’t there. Besides, the night wound that singing kind of quiet, all insects and air and predators stirring awake. He had to keep himself aware of whatever could still scent her, of the stars turning cockeyed overhead.

They really were different compared to Nekrotafeyo, the big bully spots he remembered melting into each other and clusters coming apart into dashes. That reminded him though, how Tyreen had insisted she’d be one someday and he could come too if he wanted, the alternative being oblivion of course. So he’d told himself that stars sounded nice enough. He’d started to believe.

She had a point. Now look at them.

He still resented her for conning him into the ship that night.

But he wouldn’t have left of his own volition. He would have stayed. He would have wandered into Dad’s private holo room, tried to wear the old man’s boots after he died, brought half-living monsters back to his sister until they were both  _ old _ .

The chill was a gentle one in that moment that he realized: if she wanted to go out in flames, then she had no intention of getting old, did she? That seemed like something she could have told him the same way she could have explained to him how it felt for her to eat and that she was taking him to Pandora whether he liked it or not.

She could have admitted starting the fight with the Neuron Spectres. She could have been less impulsive about that whole happiness thing in the first place. Then again, what had he done with the hermit besides operate on impulse? His intoxicated self was maybe half of an excuse for waiting to kill that person, something that had hung him up on his own needs for minutes he was wondering if he’d really been able to spare.

No. Mere minutes weren’t anything now. Neither was looking back, trying to gauge how far he’d made it through the first tracery of moonlight. 

He looked anyway. The other deer had come for the body of the one he’d killed. Their legs left firework patterns along the stones. He imagined a dark stain spreading out below them, the sounds of their teeth. Well, that either hadn’t been a waste or it absolutely was.

Tyreen was awake, squinting that way. She hadn’t seen the deer before. He wondered if they’d caught her attention or if she was still pressed down into herself, considering the star she was not.

Troy wondered so many things in that moment, some reaching deeper than others. “Hey, Ty?” he asked, his words thin. “Why didn’t you tell me before about the bandits?” He added, hastily: “I’m not mad. I just don’t get it.” An echo of his father’s voice trailed across his own.

“I was  _ gonna _ ,” she murmured. “I was gonna do storytime after we finished with the car. You said you were too tired.” 

He watched her breathing, watched her expression fade to something half asleep. He thought about that night before they’d left Tull, if it was really called Tull. If that mattered. “And I said I was tired.” He took one more step.

Tyreen shrugged, hands up and head back. She reached for him. In the next moment she had him by the ass of his pants. She pulled. The guns dumped out on the gravel, leaving him standing there in nothing but his last pair of shorts. “What the fuck! Are you too tired  _ now _ !? You’re driving me crazy!”

“Ty, shut up!” he screamed back. His voice cracked glassy off of the dunes. Troy grabbed frantically at his pants. His elbow came down hard on the point of the travois. “That was a fucking shitty thing you did.” He only mostly meant the bandits. He only mostly meant any distinct thing at all. 

“I was hungry and you left and then you wouldn’t talk to me and I didn’t know what to do and  _ Troy _ …”

“I didn’t get it, OK? Just call me a dumbfuck like you usually do!”

“Well, you are a dumbfuck! I said you’d better not…!”

“And since you forgot, you’re the one keeps telling me to stick it half the time I try to talk.”

“Fine! Stick it all the way up your ass.” She snarled, spilling off of the travois. She must have unfastened the belt. The hand she used to flip him off was tight and pale and shaking.

“What actually is your problem!?”

“Everything! What’s the point of all this, Bro?”

“I’m trying to help you!” Which was something he had no way of forgetting, but telling her there, that brought it flush up inside him and simple enough. “You don’t make it easy, you know. And I’m not the one who was good with hurt things. Maybe that’s why I keep bringing up Mama!”

Tyreen tilted her head to the side, her expression maddeningly blank.

So he bent and he begged her, words slick up with stutters, “Would you please just tell me a real thing you want right now in small words because I actually cannot anymore.” 

“Mama,” said Tyreen in the same moment she lowered her head and curled up back to herself. “And you, I guess.”

Troy raked his fingers through his bangs. He felt like someone had choked him out. His frustration was still there, clear as he needed to breathe, but he could do that now and he could move however he wanted again. So, he wanted to sit down beside her, right there on the ruins of the road. He left some space between them. 

Maybe what she’d said was all she had in her for the time being. Her ordeal had sharpened her cheeks and the peeling edges of her scar were white in dimness. Her lips cast a thin, tight shadow as she pressed them together. 

“You know, I didn’t know that at all,” he told her.

She turned back, movements faintly jumpy as though she might be trying to stop herself. “Really?” She was asking  _ him _ .

“No. I always kinda wanted to know if you, umm, felt that way about me. And I thought you’d decided you were done missing Mama.”

“Just kinda. Sometimes. I dunno. I’m still…” She sighed. “…jealous you’re the one who found her.”

It stung hearing her say that. At the same time, he knew she didn’t mean it how it sounded. 

“Like you were the one who got to say goodbye for real.” Tyreen slumped against him. He started to tell her she was going to break her bandages, dragging herself around like this, but in another instant she was looking up at him, whispering. “What was it like for you? When you touched her and she wasn’t there anymore?” The words felt years old, almost stale. 

He spoke meekly as he answered. 

(Ty had been the best sister, distracting Dad so Troy could go to Mama’s hiding spot. The twins understood that people needed to be alone sometimes. People who weren’t Troy, anyway. But, they’d missed her. 

(He stood at the throat of one of the really old ruins where the ceilings were all snapped open, throwing bright afternoon cyan along twines of red air coral.

(Mama sat in a bower of lucernae. The coral behind her head seemed darker than it should have been for such an airy spot. As he drew near, he realized Mama smelled like cold metal. There was more of the strange red on her shirt. 

(He thought she might have had a nosebleed. He got those plenty. Maybe she did too? Although he’d never seen her like that.

(“Hey Mama? Are you OK?” he asked as he climbed into her lap.)

Somewhere on Pandora, Troy’s lips curled towards a smile as he met his sister’s eyes. “I was so happy for her. She left. She just didn’t go anyplace when she did.”

(Mama’s heartbeat felt funny to him. He was so used to trying to figure his own own, so he had gotten sensitive to those things. He ran his hand up the side of her neck, thinking he’d tip her forward, kiss her head like she did him. She’d get a kick out of it. Maybe. But her neck was all sticky and… 

(Tyreen seized him. She threw him with all her might. She topped into Mama’s arms. He fell and there was this light. Mama tipped out of the coral. He saw the tear stains on her cheeks before the bloody, boney scum dribbling out of what remained of the back of her head.

(Dad’s pistol fell from Mama’s hand and skittered across the stones.

(He’d almost kissed her. While she was like that. Dead, but still bleeding.)

“There were grease smears left!” Tyreen wailed. “She was already gone! I didn’t kill her!”

“I never said you did. Don’t put Dad’s bullshit in my mouth.”

“Why not? That’s still what you think, right.” She was so shatteringly certain in the way she put that. That was a proclamation, not a statement, let alone a question even given the feverish pitch of her words.

“It’s not that, Ty,” Troy insisted. He moved his hand to her shoulder. “There’s so much stuff you keep telling me I did and… I didn’t. I know stories are just lies we want to believe, but you don’t make it easy to tell you a story either.”

As he spoke, she lowered her head. He could still see her trying to look his way through the inky glint of her lashes. Then she shoved up against him. “What are you playing at?”

“I know you didn’t kill Mama,” Troy answered. 

(A few days before Mama died, Troy had been sick. Mama had taken him into the bathhouse. It was so steamy and sweet to lie there and think about drowning beside her. At some point, Mama leaned over him and stroked his bangs out of his face. She said, “I’m so tired of watching you hurt.” The moon through the skylight washed her features out, so he couldn’t see her expression. “You should have been a little prince.” When he’d gotten all confused about what she meant, she started talking about roses.)

(Another night— he had stumbled out of the sick room and gone looking for someone. He didn’t remember who and maybe he hadn’t known. He’d come across Mama and Dad sitting by a little fire. Mama was facing Dad with her ringed hands pressed together. “I have to let him go next time. He’s so sweet, but I can’t anymore. He’s dying, Ty. Do you understand?” 

(“Don’t cry,” Dad said.

(She tided away from him, choking on a sob, “Don’t you tell me not to cry, you bastard.” And she did cry. 

(Dad tried to hold her, but she kept to her own place all the while Troy watched. He thought maybe later he’d gone back to the sick room and he kind of remembered Ty, the other Ty, had been with him. Like they’d been watching together or at least she’d found him at some point.)

(And then that very first memory of Mama: her trying to sing to him, even though  _ he  _ was crying, even though he wanted to stop. He just couldn’t. Couldn’t stop. Couldn’t remember.) 

“Because I did.” said Troy.

Tyreen smacked him dead across the face. “If I don’t get to be a melodramatic whore, you don’t either!”

She’d hardly managed to bruise him this time. He pressed his hand to the place where she’d struck him. “One, stop hitting me. Two I  _ am  _ a whore, or did you forget?”

Her mouth went back to a tight line, but she didn’t look away, just huffed at him in the intervening moment where they each caught their breath. She came up on his shoulder, and his lap if he was being honest. Then she wilted against him, heavy on his chest like she was trying to squish herself into him and let that be the end of the conversation.

“I just needed to say that loud. Even if it’s a story too.” He leaned over, resting his chin in her hair. “Umm. Thank you.”

“Why? I still took her away from you. Like even if I didn’t, I did.”

“I don’t think that’s what happened. I think she left. That’s gotta be the end of it. We can’t be hung up on how. Why are we even doing this? We’re not gonna get an answer.”

She reared at him, indignant. “‘Cause you’re making me and why the hell did you not before?”

“I don’t know.” His weary aches softened his words somewhat more than any sympathy he carried. “But it’s true. I’m happy she got away.” 

“Yeah, her and our brother.”

“Ty, what are you talking about?” He wanted her to tell him he’d misheard. Then again, he knew he hadn’t and against the rest, there was this long, numb moment, closed off as the part of him that tried so hard to die when he sometimes almost managed to be alone.

In the pause, Tyreen made this weirdly self-conscious gesture to her stomach; not her bandages, but lower down. “Best thing I ever ate, by the way. So like, if you get to be happy for her, then I can tell you that, right?”

Troy nodded. He had no way to resist what slipped out of him next. There was nothing else left of what he’d just learned he had lost. He had to know. “What did he taste like?”

“Warm and sticky. The way Mom talked about toffee pudding. Wasn’t much of him either since she was so gone. I fed you after. How did you not know?”

“I passed out twice that night. I just didn’t. I didn’t know her the same way you did.”

“Like not at all. Like we said. And how pathetic is that!? That I still miss her so bad I wanted…” Tyreen swallowed. “Her and not what I got.”

“I’m really not mad. You want what you want.”

He could feel her vibrating, waiting for something in him or the night. A part of him went  _ fuck, don’t let her have anything else in her back pocket _ . Then she put her mouth on his. It was the most innocent little pressure, the two of them resting together. 

Troy’s face went hot. But he closed his eyes and he accepted. The sensation reminded him of how he drank from her, but it settled on his skin instead of in that place he couldn’t name inside of himself. 

The kiss only lasted a few seconds before Tyreen tugged away. “Yeah, I know, that’s weird.”

Troy shook his head. He caught her by the chin and kissed her back, the same weight and same nearness. He wondered, once more for the night, just what she was feeling, so close to him and a million miles away in her own mind.

Again, she moved first, pressing on his left cheek until they parted. Her hand stole down his markings to his neck and the collar of his shirt. “Huh,” she said. “Did… did we just kiss and make up like Dad always said?”

“We did,” answered Troy. “And guess what? He  _ missed  _ it.”

He expected she’d have some sharp remark for that, but she didn’t. He skimmed back to the memory of the night before when he’d wanted her closeness so badly. Now he had it, it felt more like it was something that was  _ theirs _ than anything so selfish and cruel as he’d imagined.

Tyreen kept watching him while he decided what he wasn’t going to say. She failed to stifle a yawn that left her in a shudder. Once it passed, she thumped the travois, wobbling that way.

Yes, he understood. This time, he took his belt back and tucked her into the bloody remains of his cloak so she could rest that way instead and he could, gran his guns, tell her what came next even if he did that for his own sake. “Gonna stop at dinner’s camp, see if there’s anything else worth taking. And then, straight on to morning.”

“You absolute dork.”

He nodded. He decided to pull for another while. It wasn’t that far to the hermit’s lair. He could still discern his own way there and back— broken shrubs and stones turned out; a disturbed sketch of lichen that might well have been older than him before he passed that way. The air was so alive, howling on its own against the distance, swimming with stars and life and them.

Troy had gotten to kiss Tyreen after all. They had simply been.

Though there was still that particular emptiness of having come back from someplace he hadn’t wanted to venture inside of himself. He had,  _ they  _ had, and now all their future would be different, however long it lasted. 

That was one of her hunting clicks behind him. He hadn’t heard her make one in what felt like a long time. He clicked back. They laughed since they definitely weren’t hunting at the moment.

“So, I’m thinking,” Tyreen said, “if Mama hadn’t decided to die, we wouldn’t have had anyplace to put our stash.”

“I could have made us one,” Troy supposed. “But it wouldn’t have been the same. She gave us a hundred square feet of anathema. Back there, you know, that was… What else did she have?”

“Still angry.”

“Still miss her.”

The two of them rattled over the gravel dunes, their presence now as calm as the night was violently alive. 

He breathed.

He looked up one more time.

A bright dot with a tail chased across Elpis. Elpis meant hope and it finally hit him.

Sure, that was a satellite he kept seeing. But more than that, of course he could pick it out amongst a billion stars. What else could he be but a satellite, clinging to his orbit, praying for one more day as his home drifted beneath him. He was forever calculating his orbit by turns of other stars he knew he’d never reach; forever waiting to crash out of the night sky; forever walking in a finite span between himself and another body. He hung there, pretending not to care, floating in a pool of gravity and thinking about going under, never truly wanting to, because if he did?

He’d be alone.

Troy had never been alone. He wouldn’t know what that was like. Satellites couldn’t understand. Not for long, anyway. 

“Well,” Tyreen said, “tell me a story. I guess it’s your turn.”

“Tonight?” He tried to put a tease in his words. “OK, sure. Even though I did butt stuff.” Maybe he paused there. Maybe he winked over his shoulder.

Tyreen rattled the travois. “What? With that weirdo? No way.”

“Yes way. So, what happened was...”

He told her. Every gruesome thing he could remember. She laughed. She got quiet. She asked him if he came. He expected that she would.

When he ran out of words about the hermit, he slid into talking about something he wanted.

Once he and she had gotten over the sweet shock of landing on Pandora, they’d spent their days chasing delight and vice. This place was the one real goal they’d ever known and now everything felt so strange, so close, so absolutely fucking wonderful. Sure, no hunters of any sort would take them on and their money was running out. Neither of them cared. There had to be something waiting for them.

They ended up someplace on the outskirts of ‘Sanctuary’. Troy didn’t believe that was more than the name some idiot who ran their ECHO channel had given it. A guy who’d messed with a kid was being strung up at ten in the morning. The twins reached the scene of the party at dawn and quickly got bored of staring at the rakkshit-stained gallows. They ran off into a field of pop-up tents and people hawking from turned over ammo crates. They fingered all kinds of jewels and junk they couldn’t afford and bummed samples of food that only Troy could eat.

When ten got to rolling around, they guessed it only by the virtue of where the bodies around them streamed. Troy scooped Tyreen to his side and they ran, shoving through the crowd.

He didn’t know who’d given him the beer. Tyreen spit her taste of it into the sand. He took the rest while she sputtered against him. At some point, her “Hey, pick me up” matched with the roar of the crowd. They were trying to sing at least two different songs and he maybe kind of got her up on his waist so she rose a head taller than him, looking out over the swath of people pumping their fists to an empty sky.

She put her knees into him and she broke away, fingers in her mouth just long enough to whistle. “You scared?” she asked.

“I’m not scared!” Troy insisted. “People die all the time. Don’t they, Sis? Don’t they, my…” He hiccuped. He’d only had the one beer, but he still thought he was maybe going to puke. “…pretty, little sister.” 

“Really?” drawled Tyreen. “That’s all I am. Your sister.”

No, she was his home, his life, his everything. She held onto his cheek like she belonged there, right then and maybe some shade of again. 

The guy with the black hood got dragged up before two boys who kicked him in the balls until he bled. Only one of the boys cried. Another man, a psycho in full regalia of somebody’s tribe, led the guy to the ragged box where he would stand his last. 

Troy broke his bottle under his boots until it was green dust. 

Tyreen had to pull him up to see that very last instant when the psycho slit up the box and the guy fell, but not far enough, so he was seven minutes struggling before some kind soul in the audience shot him. In the half a minute after, everyone was screaming and laughing and clapping. They all began to dance.

Troy, Tyreen’s satellite, thought nothing of any of the other pretty boys and girls, even though there were so many.

In the present, he looked back to her.

She closed her eyes and said, “I remember. Keep talking.”

So he talked. Troy talked until his voice gave out in a fit of sand and spit. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sincere thanks to Wat_Are_Dis for tag-wrangling this chapter and pointing out that I dropped a really important line while revising. I owe you, fam. I mean, you not only looked at… whatever the hell that was …but you looked at it c. 5AM WITH TYPOS.
> 
> Updated 7/29/2020.


	14. Chapter 14

Troy didn’t make it to morning. Somewhere kissed on three hours after midnight, he hit the ground despite not being aware he was falling. Once he was off his feet, the pain started. The rope had rubbed him raw. He could feel the kink in his back trying to twist out of place. 

He waited for Tyreen to shove him on. Instead, she rolled halfway off of what had been the hermit’s sail. They’d decided to use that instead of the travois since it was lighter. It creaked as she reached out, brushed her fingers over his shoulder. Troy felt something in his body push back against hers, trying to keep them both awake and alive, but he didn’t open that way and he had nothing to give her. There was only movement between them.

“Hey,” he said, as if he meant to veer into another story.

But she cut him off. “Troy, I’m tired. Can we stop?”

“Yeah. We can stop. Let me get us someplace decent.”

She patted the back of his neck. It felt like yes. 

He picked himself up, determined to ride out this last surge between them. It brought him another few hundred yards. The mound of stone they reached was dark and dull and old. It reminded him of the ruins where they’d used to go exploring. He had a glimmer of an urge to write their names there.

Between the sail and the bedroll they’d also stolen and what was left of the cloak, Troy made a little bower. Tyreen seemed content enough to curl up there.

He said, “I’m gonna look around. I’ll be right back.”

“Sure.”

He left her, picking his way up the rocks. The night was so dark and the stone almost cool. He lay there for a long while, breathing and hurting and scanning for lights. There weren’t any. Just stars and dust. The night staggered on without them.

He made his way back to his sister.

Tyreen talked before he had a chance. “Heh. This thing’s translucent. You got me a moonroof. Finally.”

“Well, if I ever have to drag you through the desert again,” Troy said, as though that existed as some faint possibility. 

He checked her over. Her pulse was thudding. Her surfactant sighs came close together, stammering on the edges. Her fever seemed about the same, but she’d started to sweat. He felt it when he stroked her hair out of her face, something she apparently thought was funny. She chuckled when he did it. 

Troy got the last of the bandages out of the med kit. He rolled them up and wet them and pressed them to Tyreen’s forehead.

She made a sound of surprise, then wrinkled her nose, sighed again. She looked peaceful there. That was really what got him in the end. 

“Ty?” said Troy.

Tyreen hummed.

“There’s nothing else I can do.” He tried to put it plainly as he could. She’d realized a while ago. Sounded like, anyway. He more said it for himself to make it real. 

Then she had to smile as she asked him, “Yeah? You sure?”

“I’m sure. And I’m…”

“Stay.” There was this utter certainty in her voice. 

Troy nodded. He took off his boots and his t-shirt. There was probably still a racerback in their gear, and he meant to put that on, but she scuffled impatient beside him. He crawled onto the bedroll. 

Tyreen cuddled up to his bare chest. She wrapped an arm around his middle, and when that wasn’t close enough, threw one leg over his. Troy brought the compress to the back of her neck and held it there as she tucked her head under his chin.

He felt her take a breath to say something once or twice before she actually did. “I’m really happy we got away. I don’t care that this happened. I’m just happy, OK? I get it if you don’t believe me, but it’s true.”

“I’m happy too,” Troy answered, once he was certain she’d finished. He wanted to listen if she hadn’t. Her words were precious things now. “Hey, we got to be  _ us  _ for a while. I had fun. With you. And not everybody was awful. That girl in Tull…” 

“Did she taste good?” Tyreen smirked as she lifted her face from his shadows. “I know what you’re into.”

“Really good.”

“I could smell her on you.”

“Ah. Didn’t realize.”

“I  _ liked _ it.” Remembering now, her eyes sparkled. “‘cause I never got to come back smelling like anything except me. But, when you did, it was…” She looked up, searching somewhere overhead. “…delicious!” 

Troy nodded. He meant to smile back, but watching that stain of pleasure cross her face just a little too late, he couldn’t. Though, the end of them was exactly like he’d imagined. Never came for her and they lay together. Their breathing faded into sync and his heart at least tried to keep up with hers. 

Tyreen shifted, pushing up on her toes. She looked him right in the eyes to tell him, “I wanted to lick your face so I could taste her too. I mean, I wasn’t ever gonna get laid.”

“I know.”

“Do you? Do you know anything, Troy Hector DeLeon?”

Here was where he came back with a quote from a book they’d read or he teased her about something they both damnwell knew was true regardless; where he at least knew what to say that would fill the space between them.

He wanted to look into that nothingness above them where she’d found what she wanted to tell him, but he couldn’t turn himself away from her, not even in the instant where he  _ broke _ .

The tears came cool and sticky. His sobs left him shaking. He clung to his sister and he wept, unable to answer her otherwise. 

Tyreen watched him like she didn’t know what he was doing there, crying his guts out. 

Troy thought,  _ Please don’t let her go while I can’t even tell her goodbye _ . 

Then her hand lit clumsily on his cheek and her fingers scratched into his hair. If she meant to pull his face closer or not, that was what happened. She had this breathy laugh about the way she spoke after, asking him, “Do you know I’m gonna do it now even though she’s gone?”

Troy didn’t know that at all.

She was so close. Her breath smelled like blood. He needed to ask her if she was alright. Either Tyreen was blushing or the fever had settled on her cheeks. Her eyes still sparkled. “I just can’t help myself anymore.” 

“So don’t,” Troy managed to choke out. “I wouldn’t have told you no before. All you had to do was ask. That woulda been one little thing after I took so much from you, and I’m sorry, OK? I’m so sorry I didn’t…”

“Shh,” Tyreen hushed him.

And she worried his eyelids with the tip of her tongue. He felt her swallow between, then move on to lap the salt from his cheeks. She was trying to kiss his tears away, but her mouth wanted more than something so simple. As she nuzzled down his cheekbone, she opened her lips against him. Another kiss came, her breathing him in and resting like she had before. 

His sister licked his face, not only the creases by his mouth where he would have carried the flavors of his lovers, but his jawline and his lashes and once the tip of his nose, all of him that she could reach and feel.

Except his mouth. There she would hold so still until he shed another tear for her to taste.

It dawned on him slowly as his ragged breaths started to give into sighs. Tyreen didn’t know how to kiss. Of course she didn’t.

The next time she came back to his lips, he held her there. Her breath tickled his nose. He tried nudging on her mouth—  _ no, it’s more like this _ —but she drew up to clean his eyes again. 

Troy tilted his head and she did take the invitation that time, though still  _ resting  _ on him. He set the compress aside and stroked her with his damp fingers.

She let him place them on her cheek, the corner of her mouth. 

He wondered what the hell he was doing, but he still coaxed her open, held her that way, sank into her and filled her with his tongue.

Tyreen squeaked. She was so warm. After a moment of surprise, she met him, the two of them twisting together and snatching at their breath. They were both covered in spit and gasping after.

That lasted a second, maybe two, before she came back for more. 

Troy expected fingers in his hair again, pulling and bites. Instead, Tyreen was probably the most gentle, clumsy kisser he’d known. She wanted to be there with him more than she wanted to make any sense. He could see that being a thing with her. She was his sister after all.

Who wanted to lick his face clean and eat him.

Thinking that, he surged against her. They met in her mouth again. By and by, she edged back, enough that he could see the wonder on her face. “Are… Are you gonna make it happen for me? Are you actually gonna? Don’t you know only gods get away with doing their sisters?”

Troy answered with his heart. He did still have one in spite of everything that had happened. Most of it was hers anyway. He could show her. Maybe he could even make her happy one last time. Besides, he got a hell of a rush telling her, “Then I know we’re gods. You and me. Right now.” There was a desperation to the moment of saying that, bright and filthy. 

“Wow.”

“You nervous?”

Tyreen nodded.

“OK. But I got you. I’ll stay.” 

So Troy felt the strangeness that they were flow along his body where he’d been so sure he should hold it in that unspoken place inside of him. They’d been joined before, their bodies and their blood and their markings. Now they would be one again. It was almost poetical. It was  _ definitely _ a few shades past Freud and Erikson. 

Tyreen’s skin had this chemical taste that reminded him of fresh tar somewhere underneath her hormones, those heady as marijuana smoke. Troy nibbled her where her Adam’s apple would have been if she was a guy before making his way to the hollow of her shoulder, testing her there with his teeth. She huffed about it. Not her favorite place, then. 

His hand slid to the placket of her shirt in the same moment she sought his lips again. They were wound in another kiss as he unbuttoned her and she took to rubbing the scruff at the corner of his jaw. He didn’t even try to get her all the way undone, but one of the fastenings snapped as he slid his fingers over her chest. Her striker brushed against the back of his hand. He went to push it over her shoulder, but she swiped the chain over her head, then shrugged her shirt away. 

Tyreen was supple to the touch, her skin and her weight. The left side of her chest had been marble bright with blue, one swirl circling her nipple. As she tightened under his touch, this pulled into a spiral. Her nipples were that ticklish sort of puffy like Troy remembered, dark brown and a little too big for her. 

He had to ask, “Mind if I suck?” 

Tyreen crossed her arms showing off her chest and her devilish smirk. “Don’t mind. Know you like that. Why’d you think I offered, way back when?”

Troy nodded. He wriggled down beside her and took her in his mouth. Not just his lips, but as much of her nipple as he could, enough that he could go through the motions of nursing, his tongue shifting beneath her as he laid one gentle pull and then another. He couldn’t quite position himself to fondle the other, but Tyreen came around to doing that herself, rubbing the blue spiral in time with his suckles.

She draped her other arm over him, stroking his back. It put fire in his belly and his hips, being so full of her. Troy felt her first little sigh starting to well before she ever quite let it go. It turned out she didn’t mind a little of his teeth.

“Heh,” he said. “You like it too, don’t you?”

She laughed. “Guess I do.”

Troy nodded. He pressed his face against the furrow between her breasts, and he drank her in before placing his lips on her marked breast and his hand on the blank one this time. She trilled as he rolled her nipple between his thumb and forefinger, bit the other leading into another suck. They were another small while with that before she took his hand in hers and she pushed him down the slickness of her scars, stretch of her bandages.

They came to the waist of her shorts. He opened his palm against her hip and he pushed.

Tyreen obliged this time, tilting onto her back. Troy rested on her bare chest a minute before he went on. 

A minute she spent drumming her fingers on his, impatient.

“One question,” he said, “You said I’d seen you come before. I don’t remember that. I guess I didn’t get what was happening.”

“Not a question,” Tyreen snickered. “But yeah. When I was crying after I got shot. It hurt so bad I just kinda did. That’s why my pants were all wet.”

“Holy shit.” Troy had read that guys did that sometimes, dumping sperm out of soft cocks when they were wounded. His sister had had the same thing happen? He was so tempted to ask her what exactly she’d felt and did she usually squirt.

But she shoved him again. “I mean, they’re wet now. I’m kinda still bleeding.”

“I’m here for that. It’ll make it extra slippy.” Actually, Troy was very,  _ very  _ here for that. It was something he’d never done before, like he was something she’d never done before.

He should wash off though. He ended up groping towards the bag. Tyreen fished the alcohol wipes out of the med kit, ripping the packets open with her teeth and spitting the torn off corners. She held his hand in both of hers, the cool and their markings twining together. Hers seemed so bright there in the starlight and he was getting this weird sensation besides, that he somehow couldn’t stop touching her

So he didn’t. Troy walked his fingers down from her navel and under the waistband, down to her damp curls where he skimmed along her lips, where he realized— she might have been bloody, but she was also  _ soaked _ . 

In the next minute they were tearing the shorts off of her. He heard a seam rip. Her fingers slid between his and they were both skidding over her clit as he plunged into kissing her once more. She was so absolutely touchable, round and thick. He could feel her throbbing. 

“Are we both jerking me off?” Tyreen asked as she caught her breath, as she guided him against her in slow strokes.

Troy said, “Is that what you call it?”

Then, when she nodded, he squeezed. She was so wet he couldn’t keep a hold of her. Small, sweet sounds pricked in her throat as they drew over her again and together. It was suddenly she bucked into their touch. Enticed, Troy went harder, dipped lower, circled the limn of her body. She was the one who brought him into her, pressing on his finger until he slipped against the heat she held. That was the first time she told him yes, and she’d still more or less done it herself. 

She had the most toothsome weight to the front. Troy plucked her there, rocking his thumb against her clit as he did. She tensed, but in that particular way of wanting more. So he gave her that and that was yes again, a kiss slamming into him and her body making a soft sucking sound as he worked. 

“That’s how I usually rub one out,” she half-laughed when they once again came up for air. “That thing’s  _ wicked _ .”

“Well, aren’t you just full of surprises tonight?” said Troy. He added, “And you mean this?” He tweaked her g-spot, hard, testing another finger as he did.

Tyreen swiped at him with her bloody hand. “No, no, stop. That’ll finish me off. I wanna try your mouth.”

Stopping took more of him that he would have figured, but his anticipation led him on. “Oh, and you’re right. That’s something I’m into,” he said. He gave her another flick before he got down between her legs.

Tyreen cocked one knee and then the other, making what was maybe supposed to be a seductive face the whole time, though she had her tongue sticking out while she did it and so came off more mischievous. She had showed him before, after all. 

This time, Troy looked. His fingers left a red smear on her thighs as he was the one who nudged for a better view.

She came off almost statuesque from the front, all curls aside. On her back though with him kneeling between her legs, she looked thick and luscious, her heavy lips lined with creases of darker skin. Her clit showed hot pink against the rest. The mouth of her cunt had blushed too, and flexed slowly as she breathed. She was also a syrupy, bloody mess. Her thick scent made Troy’s mouth water. He licked his lips.

Tyreen raised an eyebrow.

Troy got down and he opened his mouth against her. He gave her his lips and his tongue and the little wound still open there; everything he had. It took him a few movements, but he got her breath to hitch. He held a feral smile in the back of his mind knowing that he had. He also kept at his work. A little harder here, a little more there, a little of having to shift his face because her curls had started to tickle. 

She tasted tarte and summery. There was some other word for it, but in the moment, melting against her, he couldn’t think of it. It was to him the taste of  _ her _ . He could catch her want too in the slippery way she clenched between swipes of his tongue.

Tyreen set her marked foot to his side and shoved. Her calluses scratched and Troy jostled out of place, inhaling a little too deeply, which meant that smell, that was  _ in  _ him so many ways. He looked up with a feverish moan of his own. She groped towards him, not to grab his hair as he’d expected, but towards his hand.

He gave it to her. Their fingers laced. Blood and slickness smacked on their palms. Troy went back to her. She started, asking for more in the same instant; pushing herself up against him; riding his mouth with her whole body and fumbling over his knuckles. He kissed her like he would have her mouth. It made her laugh a little, tremble too, but in that very particular way girls did when they were tripping on pleasure.

Troy pulled off once more to tongue his way into her. He needed to know what she’d do, which was sob before trying to tug him around by his ear. He understood. He put himself back to her clit and he felt her foot slide down his spine in the same moment she hitched up off of the bedroll. 

“Troy, I’m gonna come,” she hissed and she pulled his hand towards her wounded belly, squeezing and resting with him there as he pushed the tender underside of his tongue all the way up the swell of her clit, once and then again when she started swearing and choking out his name. As she tensed up.

As she shrieked. He didn’t even breathe through the edge. He wanted her to do it, to come. Her whole body flared against him. His only instinct was to suck harder, so he did and his ears hurt and she cracked his knuckles. Salty, slick cum poured out of her, as much as a guy would have made, and leaking as her shivers finished. He couldn’t possibly lick her clean before she soaked herself and she came down.

Troy shifted so he rested his chin on her mound. If she’d been flushed at the start, she was red in the face now, her eyes glassy and half-lidded. Even her lips looked darker against the bruising they already had. She pressed her palm to his cheek. He wanted to turn and lick her, but her touch strayed over his forehead and the space beneath his left eye. “Matches your marks,” she said. 

He figured he looked like he’d ripped somebody’s throat out, yet still kissed more blood from her fingers. 

It got a rise out of her, this long, slow shudder of a breath that sank through before she spoke again. “Mm. You fuck me next, right?”

“You can be done if you want,” he answered. The thought was past the pale they had already crossed, but it was something he desperately wanted. 

“No. Not done.” She shook her head. And then she smirked, a little more of that pretending to be sexy way with too much tongue.

Troy got back on his knees. It was strange— unfastening his pants felt like an afterthought even though he was hard and slippery. Tyreen tensed up when she saw him. Then she flexed, her lips and her cunt wondering about space for him. Her next breaths ran shallow. She worked her marked hand up his underside, then closed at his head. The first tug was experimental and light. The second she pulled him closer.

Troy reached for her, his hand and his cock and that place where she opened him somewhere deep in his chest. His heart went out to her more than anything else in that moment he pushed into her. She was hung up on his lap and their hands had laced together again. She felt aching inside and he’d met her as deeply as he could through that one movement, unsettled and warm. She’d filled him with her blood and her life, but it only served to sharpen his want. They spent this slow, electric while gazing at each other and breathing and being.

The first thrust rolled clumsy from his hips. He didn’t want to hurt her, but like she’d said about herself, he couldn’t help it after a certain point. She smoothed against him as her pulse quickened, as her breath cracked into panting and he heard himself gasp somewhere at the edges of his senses. He was gone in her, her skin and her sounds, both her voice and that satisfying wet smack the two of them made when they met. She dripped all over him, coming up moans now.

He dimly realized that he wasn’t all in her. It hardly mattered. The most succulent places on his shaft and tip were tight up against her, that very deep draught that usually got him told to back off. He was going to ask her if she was alright, but of course she beat him to it.

“Fuck, that’s intense. I can feel that in my chest.”

“Oh really?” He asked. He also got into her a little harder next thrust. He expected an ouch waiting off to the side, but instead she bit down on him. 

Tyreen pulled her marked knee towards her chest. He smiled down on her in the same moment she threw her hips against him. They sang out together and he dared to try her a little harder. She seemed to enjoy screaming, him striking her more sharply inside than he did so many of the people who picked him up. He’d really never had a lover, all these handfuls of months, but that was him and this was her, now, open on his lap as he gave her every inch she could take. 

He loved it, how she felt and how much she told him yes with her body and her words. It was breathless and wonderful and he thought that even if the circumstances had been different, he still would have wanted things some shade of this way. Where they were happy. Where they were themselves. Where nobody and nothing else mattered.

She kicked her heel into the small of his back to pull him in. It was so brutal, her wanting, and it still didn’t hurt him more than half a bruise another day. 

Tyreen came again after telling him four or five times that she would, this long, shuddering orgasm that leaked down both of their thighs. Troy had to lean into her to keep from getting shoved or slipped out of her body, so he was deep against her shaking muscles, crying out himself.

If they’d done this in town, she’d have woken everybody for a mile. It broke his heart that no one else got to hear her and then there she was kneeing him in the side. “Don’t stop.”

“I don’t…” It was getting harder and harder to sort out words. Troy’s mouth ran hot. He tasted her still when he breathed. “I don’t think I can!” The laughter that wrang out of him though slid into a moan. He guessed he shouldn’t have been surprised. He was painfully close.

She yelled at him,  _ yes _ and  _ do it _ and  _ come on _ . His ears were ringing and his back smarted. He didn’t so much climax as give way, his own body singing out in want that suddenly evaporated. Tyreen gave another small shriek, clenching on him a handful more times as he went light inside, insensible and sated.

They were both still laughing as they came around to trying to catch their breath. Troy tried to gesture that he needed a minute, but she wouldn’t let him go. He was shuddering now, hunched over her. He didn’t so much pull out as slip from her body in a splash of bloody semen that left her twitching. He felt boneless and more than a little dizzy. He hadn’t even realized he was drenched in sweat.

Troy pushed over, landing beside her with a sigh. 

Tyreen sat up somewhat, trying to get a look at the mess they’d made. She ended up sticking her hand between her legs and pulling up as much liquid as she could. The pinkish froth trickling between her siren markings looked creamy and sweet.

He tried to encourage her to give it a lick by taking one himself.

She obliged, but made a face. Then she leaned in to kiss him. That ended up being how she’d done it at first, that sighing weight against him and he let her have that. She dribbled their juices all over her chest in her distraction.

Troy was more than willing to clean her once they were finished with that of all their kisses. He untangled their fingers so he had his own to hold her breasts as he nuzzled beneath them for stray trickles.

“Wow, you came a lot,” she said, fumbling herself again as he worked. “Didja like it?”

“I liked it a lot,” Troy answered. “You couldn’t tell?”

“Mm. I thought you mighta. I really did.” The next sigh she made crashed a little in her chest and she shuddered into goosebumps against him.

So, he licked her nipples, meaning to linger there. Her heart was still pounding and she was so warm and he enjoyed the way she smelled with him on her, like rain after a long dry spell. 

Tyreen pulled him back up to her though. She was rough about it all of a sudden, her movements wide and sloppy. “And hey, now I won’t be dying a virgin. Nice.” She came eye-to-eye with him for that part.

Though he could feel how much she meant to words deep in the edges of her whole presence.

She smiled, halfway and crooked. Then collapsed into his embrace. Her moan wasn’t a happy one. She felt empty somewhere on his touch. 

“H-hey! That wasn’t me giving you permission to go.” He tried once more to tease her.

He tried, and there was no answer besides this pained, little hum. She seemed to have shrunk somehow, down to this tiny, broken thing when before she’d filled his senses so thoroughly.

“Ty?”

That time, silence.

Troy reached away from her long enough to grab the cloak and the compress. He dabbed her off, then wrapped her up as best he could.

“I know I love you,” he said.


	15. Chapter 15

Troy fought to stay awake. Just in case.

Just in case she woke up and she needed him one more time.

At a certain point, dawn came. Tyreen moaned and passed a thick, spermy clot. He didn’t think she was awake, but the thing still looked like it had hurt. Troy put it in his mouth, tasting himself and the bitter inside of her womb. 

He closed his eyes and maybe dozed a moment, maybe died a little.

It was another soft sound from her that woke him. Tyreen’s markings purled and crackled. Her breasts pebbled against him. She began to shiver in spite of the warmth still clinging to the desert.

Troy hung onto her as tight as he could. He wanted to kiss her, trace his fingers through her hair, but he couldn’t move that far anymore. 

Her next shiver shook him too.

Subsequent flits of awareness had him holding his breath to see if he could catch her heart beating. It was and it was and she sighed, pain on the bare edges of her voice. 

Troy took one last longing look at her, so much as he could see her, snuggled in his shadows. Then he slipped away from himself.

As blank as his dreams had been his last few nights, the one that found him now was neon vibrant. 

He and Tyreen walked along a shoreline. The night was cool and the sea made no sound despite the salty drift rising from the waves. It tasted, felt like shower spray to Troy, but he’d never seen anybody’s sea and he didn’t know any better. The sky was spattered with vessels, whole flocks of hibiki bune and frigates and battleships streaking colors like a city night suspended in the sky.

He realized they were all pointed towards the Milky Way. 

“I guess it’s time to go,” he said. He was very conscious of how his mouth suddenly felt like a mouth again and not a mass of dried out pain. 

“Been waiting for you to get tired,” Tyreen responded. “C’mon.”

They kept on walking. 

At a certain twist of the sand, they came upon a woman, tall and statuesque. She reminded Troy of the figures in some of the Eridian art that Mama had used to teach him the language. When she saw them, she stepped to the side and she said something into a wrist comm. There was no door that closed behind them, no sword she cast across their path, but her motions had a finality to them.

He and his sister walked upwards into the air, following a spiral staircase Troy could not see, but apparently she could. It should have been six miles at least up to the spaceships, but maybe a tenth of that passed, the two of them smirking at each other through the whole thing.

They lit on a bridge that only made sense in a dream sort of way. There were too many windows, too many doors, too many twisting lights and signals from the fleet outside.

“I wanna see how this ends,” he said to someone he would have called a friend, even though he didn’t know her name. 

She nodded, smiling, and led Tyreen away from his side, offering cigarettes as they went. Troy didn’t protest. That was just how this moment went and he accepted that, even before it happened.

Another woman told him, “It ends how it ends. You’re a silly boy, you know.”

“I’m not a boy,” he said with confidence.

He sat with them, these people he knew in the dream. One wearing an old cross talked about how humanity was leaving Earth because Earth wasn’t something they’d bought or earned. She explained some kind of again how everyone could get remade, if they wanted, before going to this tiny pocket in the sky that was somehow actually theirs. “There aren’t any big stars there. It’s pretty quiet.”

“We all get to be together,” another of them assured him.

Troy wanted to say that was fine. It meant more space for his sister.

She kept talking: “ _ You _ want remade? I mean, everybody’s gonna see if you don’t.”

Troy glanced at the place where his right arm should have been. There was movement around him. The hour in the sleeping drift of his mind drew near. “They’ll see that I love her,” he said. “Well, I do. And I don’t care who sees.”

The people on the bridge… the  _ women _ on the bridge, he realized …cast looks between one another. He didn’t think they expected his response. The one who’d called him a silly boy sat down beside him and she stared at him. He wondered if she was supposed to be his mother. She couldn’t have looked more different than what little he remembered of Leda, except for the way she pressed her ringed hands together. “Alright,” she said. 

She left as suddenly as she’d come to him, moving off to the control displays. This caught alight beneath her hands and one by one the other woman peeled off to their own stations, chatting now. 

One more came up behind him. She ran her fingers through his hair until he leaned back to look at her. Before he could quite rest his head on her body, she moved away, saying, “She’s waiting for you.” A door opened with a metallic swish and she fled through it.

By the time Troy reached the door himself, she was gone. Then, so was the door.

The gray corridor beyond lasted much too long without anybody to smirk at. Troy thought,  _ If this is what the tunnel on the way to the light looks like, I am fucking disappointed _ . It didn’t even get brighter in any sensible way, but it did do that. Troy tried to walk slower at first, last a little longer, but there wasn’t any point.

And besides. She was waiting for him.

Tyreen stood at the gaskets of a white airlock on the very edges of the ship. She looked older, in soft focus. Something like that. When she saw him, she said, “Oh. Nothing’s changed. I guess.” Even though she had changed somehow. She just hadn’t been remade. How he knew that?

More dream logic. It had to be. Troy smiled at her. “That’s ‘cause you’re perfect the way you are. You know that, right?”

She snickered at him like he’d lost his mind. But then, she smiled too, wide enough to make her scar crinkle.

Troy reached out. 

How quickly she took his hand, how softly she squeezed. And she winked, saying, “C’mon. It’s gonna be fun this time.”

_ Really not a bad way to go, dreaming about you like this _ , thought Troy.

They walked together into the field of spaceships.

It seemed like the last thing he was meant to know.

When his boot touched the forever between him and the Milky Way he woke up.

Tyreen had gotten out of his arms at some point. She was sleeping normally now, on the far side of the bedroll, naked in a puddle of her own blood. She was also grinning, whatever she dreamed. 

Troy reached out to her. He stopped short.

He knew where the virgule on his wrist was supposed to end. Now, the mark rose over the back of his hand, reached up, and feathered around his ring finger. It reminded him of the spiral Tyreen showed on her breast. If he touched her there once he managed to move, that came out of his surprise.

It was dead silent in the desert outside of the sounds of her snoring. There wasn’t even any wind. Troy certainly wasn’t breathing in that moment.

Tyreen shifted and purred. Her right hand flopped sleepily towards him. “Baby.” 

“Ty?” Troy answered. He was barely whispering when he did.

She hummed at him, hips shifting against the bedroll.

“I’m right here.” He took her by her wrist, pressing her hand to his face, so she could feel it was him, all sticky with his tears and her juices.

She stuck her thumb up his nose before feeling around over his cheekbone and knotting her fingers in his hair. All at once she pulled him close. There was something subtle that shifted in her smile, this calmness in her eyes.

He didn’t know what to say, what to call it, where to even start.

She sighed though. “Ugh. I gotta shit so bad.”

Troy laughed. He didn’t expect her to join him, but she did. By and by he managed to get out, “OK. I’ll help,” and gave her a tug so she’d follow him out from under the sail. It took her a few seconds of rooting in the gravel to do it. Then she did it with her striker in her fist.

There wasn’t a living thing left for two hundred yards in any direction. The desert had bleached down to its bones all around them. Sandy, sparkling corpses littered the blinding whiteness.

The twins looked at one another. 

Troy raised an eyebrow. 

Tyreen swung the sparker back around her neck and yawned, “Was having the craziest dream. That’s all I got.” Then her hand went to her stomach.

So Troy held his sister over a ditch. So much came out of her he wondered how she’d held it all in her little belly. There was no blood though besides what she was otherwise still shedding. Both of them sighed with relief. 

“Well, that was disgusting,” Tyreen said as she picked herself up.

“You shoulda seen the mess that deer made,” Troy countered, teasing after her like he’d been trying to before. However long ago before was by then.

“Ewwwww.” She stuck her tongue out, scraping it over her front teeth as she pulled it back. “Mm. I want some water.”

“Yes,” said Troy.

She perched herself on a stray stone. When he came back to her with one of the jugs, she shoved her hand in his pocket, searching for soap chips. She took two handfuls of water from him to birdbath herself, but they had more since they’d raided the hermit’s camp.

Troy dribbled some over her head.

She shook out and looked entirely too pleased with herself. After, she drank. He held the jug the whole time and watched her suck on the edge of the plastic.

Having finished, she decided to bite him. “So, did you actually fuck me last night or was I delirious?”

“Both,” said Troy.

Tyreen pulled away with possibly the worst fake cough he’d ever heard. “OK, wow.”

Troy righted the jug and bit the inside of his cheek. He didn’t do great with morning after moments involving other people and this was, well… Speaking of things he didn’t know: how were they even supposed to sort this out?

But if Tyreen had been laughing before, she busted up in the next moment. There was one incidental ouch when she doubled over too fast and her hand went to her wound, but then it was just her, just laughing, just punching him in the side for a change. “So I had to be half-dead and half-crazy before you got the hint? Little slow on the uptake there,  _ dear brother _ .”

He wilted where he stood, hearing that. That complicated issues. That was maybe years of him second guessing his life.

But fuck it. They were there now, alive and talking and breathing and being and she really was awfully cute, stabbing a finger at him for those last two seconds before he slammed his hand down on her shoulder. “My little sister had to lose some of her big, fat ego before she admitted she wanted me to dick her down until she screamed. Which is totally what happened, by the way. Why’d you think you woke up  _ naked _ ?” He was pretty sure he was still teasing her. 

“Mm, I thought we were gods? Don’t gods get all of the ego?” Tyreen sat back, crossing her arms in a dare. “You tell me I’m wrong.”

"Pretty sure you’re the goddess of being right, though.”

“No. I’m a god. Goddesses are lame.”

“Oh, us.” Troy countered, trying to make it sound like the most blase, usual exchange. Of course, once she snorted at him, that backfired as hard as possible. “Listen to this shit! Holy fuck.”

“Yeah, I think we gotta work on our schtick, Bro. Meantime,” she pursed her lips and then unabashedly looked at his crotch. “How long until you can get it up again?”

“Ty, that’s maybe an hour if I’m tired and you’ve been out for like a lot.” 

“Huh. Good to know.” With that, she rubbed her hands together and reached for his fly.

Troy grabbed her wrist. He lunged in, kissing her as deep and as hard as she could.

Tyreen kissed him back and that was that. They were hands all over each other. She seemed weirdly fascinated by the back of the neck. He drank in every scar with his fingertips, coming closer to her wound than he should have. Though he found it still warmer than the rest of her, it didn’t seem as clearly marked. Then she got rough with his navel to the point where he was tempted to tell her to quit it and shove her hand down his pants. When she finally broke from his lips to gasp, that left Troy facing the hollow of her jaw.

“Can I kiss you here?” He asked, flicking his tongue over the space

Tyreen’s whole body tightened at the gesture. “Umm. I guess.”

So he did. Kissed her with his mouth wide open, his tongue and his teeth riding her. Kissed her until she yelped. “Oh, you like that?” said Troy. “Had a hunch.”

“That’s like… I can feel that in my clit.”

“You can feel a lot more if you hold still.”

“Not happening. Ah!”

He’d bitten her there again. Of course he had. He’d have been a fool to do otherwise. It was already going to leave a mark. He wondered though— how much of a mark would she like? He pulled back to ask.

She lunged after him, panting. She looked startled somehow that he’d moved.

Troy took a deep breath and tried to talk fast. “OK, so I know this is like your second time, but you’re right. I do like it…”

“Wait, stop. Stop!”

“Look, if we’re gonna go with this, there’s a couple things I gotta ask. I get my timing sucks.” 

“Troy! CAR!” The whole conversation had been tripping frenetic between them, one emotion spilling into another, at least on his side of things, but when she said that, he snapped back to an outward awareness. He snapped towards the highway, then realized that was behind her. She had to be looking the other way. He spun over his shoulder.

A big, black truck cast a cloud of dust along the far horizon.

Troy zipped his pants up and he ran. Pain shot through his feet and the beating of his steps. He hadn’t even thought of his boots. Funny, he’d hardly been able to feel how messed up he was when he was with her. He groped into his left thigh pocket, rooting out condoms and bandaids. A shard of plastic nicked him on the forefinger. So his signal mirror was broken.

But the condom packs were foil. He whipped one out and tried to flash it. The first one was purple and didn’t cast much light. He threw it and tried another brand. 

The truck drove on, headed that same southward way they’d been trying to reach.

Troy wasn’t even trying to spell out S-O-S at that point. He needed to catch the driver’s eye. Did he have his gun if it came to that? He did not. The car was pulling away from his line of sight. Should he shout? He doubted they could hear him. He had so little air in his lungs besides, pounding after them.

Were they slowing? He thought they might be.

Were they drawing a bead on him? Wouldn’t that fuck all.

Troy ran just the same.

He ran right into the shallow wash, crashing down all limbs and dirt and a very uncomfortable moment of bashing the remains of his hard-on. He splattered onto a pat of concrete and lay there for a dizzying few seconds with an engine buzzing in his ear. The truck’s tires would have been in reach if he’d had an arm on that side.

A woman in a blue check shirt dress climbed out. “You know, I’d say I was surprised, but that would imply I had expectations,” she said, toing her boots against the scruff of the wash

“Hah,” Troy coughed. “Nice.”

“I pull off the service road to check out that weird mirror spot and poof— one-armed dude running at me full-tilt.” She took a moment to shove her pistol back in her belt. She had no holster, Troy noticed, just a ratty as hell Torgue. 

He got himself more or less upright, thinking of asking her— mirror spot? But once his eyes decided to focus again, he saw that in the daylight distance the white void of sand where he and Tyreen had slept reflected the sky almost as brightly as a pool of water.

“Well, that’s what I get for  _ not  _ wondering why the resident kook in Tull won’t come this way. Bet you want a lift.”

Troy squinted and scratched at his head. It was so weird to be hearing another sane-ish person’s voice after so long, though there was something off about her inflection. Well, everything was off on Pandora, to some degree at least. 

“Or not? I mean, not judging if you don’t but… No, I’m totally judging you.”

“I’m not alone.”

The woman chuckled, then bent and slapped his shoulder. “Of course you’re not.”

She might have been smaller than him, but she nonetheless loaded him into the back of the truck amongst her boxes and boards rather than inviting him in or letting him get there himself. Troy took the ride down to the sail on his knees, sandy air in his teeth and the jostle of the truck bed hurting his back. That last might have been more about the night before, when he thought over matters again. He had no regrets. He waved as he caught first blink of his sister.

She’d pulled on the racerback while he was gone. Frankly, it showed off more than it hid. 

Troy jumped from the back of the truck before it quite stopped. He ran to her and they embraced. 

The woman leaned out of the window to watch, her head craned to the side. By and by, she actually got out.

Troy had to tell her, “She’s hurt pretty bad, so umm…” gesturing to Tyreen as he did.

“Yeah, but I’m riding in the back with you,” Tyreen insisted.

“I don’t care. I’m throwing your shit in the front seat and never taking the service road again,” the woman said cheerfully. “Jesus Fucking Christ on a piece of Turkish Delight.” With that, she stomped off towards their gear, motioning for Troy to follow. 

Troy did. 

“Ooh. Water. Nice,” she said and rubbed her hands together on spotting their stash. She cracked one of the bottles without asking and drank greedily, streams pouring over the corners of her mouth.

The water was somewhat replaceable. Troy ground down his annoyance and focused on avoiding her interference with their more permanent supplies. He stuck his Vladoff in his waistband to make sure she didn’t mess with it. He also asked as he was gathering up the clothes Tyreen had spilled, “Wait. Service road?”

The woman nodded while she was still halfway drinking. She swiped her hand across her face— she was almost pretty with cat’s eye lenses in her glasses, but she belched like a grungy mechanic. “For the ‘highway’. I mean, the highway never went anyplace besides the bluffs up thattaway.” She pointed south, which was still somehow up and either way, Troy couldn’t see any bluffs. “Dahl was supposed to build a clay mining harvester center thing, but I guess you can figure how that went.” 

“It didn’t.”

“So, now the highway’s all hermits and creepyass drifter-looking things with antlers. You’d have to be an idiot to use it.”

Troy nodded slowly.

The woman’s wet lips curled into a simper. “Were you two idiots?”

“Kinda.”

“I’m not even gonna ask where her clothes went.”

“Would you believe bandits?”

“I would. Now let's get out of here before whatever made this mess eats us alive. Yeesh. Bandit’s oughtta be the least of it.”

He and the woman packed up the car as she’d suggested. They decided to leave the bloody bedroll, which she politely refused to remark upon. They took the sail though, propping it up in the back between some of her heavier boxes. 

Troy hoisted Tyreen into the truck bed using one of the emergency blankets. The woman tried to roll down the back window, only to have it topple out of place, to which she shrugged, and shoved it in beside the sail.

Troy made himself comfortable. Tyreen decided to use him as a chair which  _ quite _ improved his situation. As soon as the woman started the car, music blared, something loud and slapping with two singers who couldn’t seem to keep up with each other. Troy wondered how he hadn’t noticed it before, but then again, his mind had been on other things the first time.

The woman said, “Hey, by the way, I’m…” Her voice was half lost in the engine screech, the sideways notes. Troy thought he heard half a dozen names and then again none at all. So, they weren’t getting any small-talk. Not that he cared what the woman had to say. 

There was movement and music. Tyreen cuddled into his armpit despite the sweat glistening on her forehead. When he kissed a few drops away, she slitted her eyes at him, smacked her lips and sighed. He stroked her hair even though it was filthy and there wasn’t much left.

They sat together and they were. The desert snatched at them as they rode into the south they’d been trying to reach.

Why had it ever been south and this way and tomorrow? Troy thought he remembered, but there weren’t so many reasons left that he would have held up as real things anymore.

They’d come this far and the rest of his own past tasted almost as much of a dream as the field of starships. He cherished every ounce of Tyreen’s weight against him and the music was nice too, he guessed. Tomorrow lived again and while he didn’t know what would happen or even how exactly they’d get there, he and she still had that much.

The service road streamed past another low canyon and the sky gushed hot blue down to the horizon where it normally bled out white. A rambling path of stones and cliffs opened up before them, all soft slick with the transitory humming of the desert in the heat of the day. 

The woman brought them up a perilous sketch of a path to the highest point of the bluffs. Someone had tried to settle there once or twice. An old shipping container rusted away between some scrappy umbrella remains. Another traveller had stopped there not long ago, their footprints still showing between the stones.

”Nice place for a break,” said the woman, having parked suddenly as if she was breaking for another one-armed man. Troy whacked his shoulder on one of her boxes. Tyreen pulled a face. The driver, she got out, swinging around the front of the truck with her arms stretched behind her head. She went right for their water. Having taken another fill, she dumped the rest of the jug onto the ground.

A handful of roses waited without blossoms in the shady parts of the crags. They looked like the same sort that had grown in the gash. The water made them shudder and shake.

”Probably didn’t have to do that,” said Troy. “Roses are desert plants.” He climbed out of the truck this time, lingering along the side to get a better look at the flowers and the view. The view impressed, all toppling amber and burnt cyan shadows down into the valley.

The woman said, “Well, I wanted to. So, about my fee for not, you know, making you part of my bumper.”

”Yeah? Well, we got booze too,” Troy offered. “Or…”

He only trailed off because of the movement flickering beside him.

Tyreen reached over the edge of the truck bed. She held him by his scar to whisper, “Troy, I’m hungry. Can you feed me?”

“All kinds of cool shit, I bet.” The woman stretched again, armpits to that too-blue sky and her back to them.

Troy nodded. He walked out after her and put his hand through the sharp slickness of the wet roses as he went. “And me if that’s your thing. You said your name was…” He tried to copy what she’d said. It tasted like lies in his mouth.

“Yeah, I did. Good ears. I don’t think I got yours by the…”

As she turned over her shoulder, her glasses slid down the sweat on her nose. 

They locked eyes in the instant. Troy smiled and shot her in the stomach. Bits of her insides sprayed out. She was clutching at herself, leaking blood and tissue as she went down on her knees. The glasses slipped from her entirely. Every inch of her quivered and her eyes were so wide he couldn’t have said what color they were. Green. Maybe. 

As she reached for her gun, Troy put his boot down on her hand. Her knuckles crunched under his foot. 

That should have made enough of a mess of her that he could leave her and go back for Tyreen.

His sister though had dropped out of the truck. She didn’t so much walk over as loom their way. 

The woman was mute and drooling by the time her shadow hit her.

Tyreen licked her lips. Her whole body seemed to glint as she reached out with her marked hand and she said, “We’re gonna build a temple on your bones, Lies. We’ll have a million brothers and sisters and people will send us presents for no reason and everything wrong with us’ll be OK.”

The woman was gone in a handful of heartbeats. Troy meanwhile laughed and laughed. "You’re  _ ridiculous _ ," he managed to get out.

“Love you, too,” said Tyreen.

It was the first time she’d ever said it to him without prompting from their mother; the first time since Leda had given up on that, then left them anyway. 

He wanted to tell her  _ he knew _ against everything else.

But there weren’t any words left

Troy stared at her a moment across the dust. He let go of a handful more tears. Then he held his hand out to her.

Tyreen took it and she spun him, just slowly, droplets of blood smeared after their footprints and sparkler lights dancing on their fingertips.


	16. Epilogue

They’re out in the desert tonight. Not because they have to be. There’s plenty of churches where they could crash. It’s just— sometimes it suits them to go out amongst their people, their followers. It keeps the brothers and sisters in place if they see their Twin Gods walking as they do, waking by their fires and simply being there when dusk falls and the desert comes alive.

Tyreen sits on a stone at the edge of camp, far from the ash and the remains of their feast. The silver threading in her desert cloak still shines even though the sun’s been gone for a few long minutes. She reads aloud.

Bandits and madmen hush in audience before her.

Him only, of his country and his wife

Alike desirous, in her hollow grots

Calypso, Goddess beautiful, detained

Wooing him to her arms. 

But when, at length, Of his return 

(by the decree of heav’n)

To Ithaca, not even then had he, 

Although surrounded by his people, reach’d

The period of his suff’rings and his toils.

Troy doubts the verses make any sense to them. He knows that in their hearts they have to be here anyway, be rapt to  _ her _ . It’s the same way he knows he’s heard this one about a million times and that in the dusk Tyreen’s eyes seem to be full of sky rather than anything bodily at all. These things are simply true.

He’s been wandering the crowd, trying to choose his own after dinner drink of a girl, maybe a guy. He does quite like rangy bandit guys. But his interest in others has waned. He keeps watching his sister pluck poetry against the violet twists of the clouds.

He comes closer. He leans against her, just a touch, just a breath.

He can taste in a touch now that she’s hungry. It’s not painful. It’s something he knows about someone in his life; something there and waiting and alive. It is, he thinks, a little bit like how he wants her. 

He used to tell himself that he didn’t, as if somehow he could have lost her to the words.

He remembers. He almost  _ did _ .

Sometimes, the old highway between the cliffs feels light years away. Sometimes he can still smell the cordite fever on her skin. 

“You’re in my light,” says Tyreen. The voice she uses when she reads is clear and colorless, but when she talks, when she is herself, that’s strummed up crystal chords that seem to make their own baseline.

If the faithful don’t understand _The_ _Odyssey_ , he doubts they can hear the difference. It makes the fact he can sweeter. He gives her his best shit-eating grin. “My bad,” he says. He puts his arm around her.

Tyreen gives a small snort that he’s pretty sure only he can hear.

He borrows the crowd from her for a moment. “But so you guys know, and I get that this is a lot to take in: just ‘cause I’m a god doesn’t mean I’m not here to touch the face of god. ‘cause I am so here for that.” 

“Same, Bro. Same.”

That would be their cue to draw apart. They’ve been disruptive of themselves enough for one evening and that too is a privilege only gods have. 

But this mountain of a man gets to his feet.

Neither Troy nor Tyreen reaches for their weapon. They have bodyguards for that and besides, this happens, often enough; this very particular kind of magic when everybody’s got wine and fervor in their veins. It’s a sight too, to see a giant quake. 

He says, “Please. I know what he’s saying.”

“Are you sure? Do you know that? Do you know  _ anything _ ?” Tyreen questions him.

He takes one heavy step forward. The eyes of his mask are red, maybe amber. The gathering twilight has made it hard to tell. Besides, he’s swaying so much. All of a sudden though, he nods to himself. He walks with purpose, moving through the crowd of supplicants to kneel at Tyreen’s feet. “I knew nothing before I knew you.”

Troy rubs his lips in the collar of his coat to hide his smile. Not because he shouldn’t be smiling, but because that too stirs a memory and one he will not share.

“Hmm. Let me tell you a holy secret.” Tyreen brushes her hand over Troy’s as she stands. 

The man pushes his shoulders down, trying to make himself smaller than her.

But she snaps her fingers by his ear. 

He lifts his head. He dares to breathe. 

“Let’s say, revelation number nine. You can touch me any time you want. You just might not be alive when you’re done. You’re OK with that, right?” There is no gentleness in her offer.

Or in what she does next, shedding her clothes.

She stands naked before the congregation. Her markings have come alive, but it seems so have her scars, shimmering like insect wings. So have her tattoos, all bones and feathers and sigils and Calypso spelled over her shoulder blades. 

It is the scars that draw the bandits in. They never expect them to be there. The bullet wound especially enchants them. It looks fragile, but it’s hard beneath. She still wears the bullet inside of herself, after all. It’s callused over someplace in her guts that only Troy had felt.

Tyreen says, “I suffered to stay here with my family. Do you get that too?” 

Troy already knows this. The rest will hear. He recites from memory.

Yet all the Gods, with pity moved, beheld

His woes, save Neptune; 

He alone with wrath

Unceasing and implacable pursued

Godlike Ulysses to his native shores. 

The moon crests. Satellites topple over each other somewhere between there and where he stands. He thinks he hears a rakkhive lowing in the distance.

A man dies at his sister’s feet and all’s right with the world.

Finis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My deepest thanks to Lia, BorderSpam, DramaticDino, god_queen & Wat_Are_Dis. Without them, I doubt I’d be typing this author’s note. 
> 
> As Promised, Music  
> Listen: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIMNbgHaX5zefwFs5PUVNCoV_nhY9bQMU  
> Probably lower key than people were expecting. One generally does not write people wandering the desert to Carpenter Brut. Generally.
> 
> 80AM: Somebody  
> Afterlife: Pirates— Milchbar Mix  
> Anna of the North: Lovers  
> Bt: Satellite *COUGH*  
> Café Royale: Waterfoot Park  
> Cameragrammar: Netflix & Chillwave  
> Camouflage: I Can’t Feel You  
> Deep Deluxe: In Your Shadow  
> Depeche Mode: Strangelove  
> Eelke Kleijn: Moments of Clarity  
> Enamour: Love Syndrome  
> Faro: The Sense of Shape + Calypso (I mean, I had to)  
> Fejká: Sunlight  
> Geotic: Sunspell  
> Hello Meteor: Charcoal and Ash + Night Distance  
> Idenline: Together  
> Jens Buchert: Cocoon  
> Jens Gad Presents Secrets Of Seduction: Punta del Este  
> Kalliope: Lunar Landings  
> Koda: The Last Stand— Claes Rosen Remix  
> Lange & Stine Grove: Crossroads— Percussive Mix  
> Lazerhawk & Gunship: Feel The Rush Tonight (on which Tyreen’s song in the car was based)  
> Le Visiteur feat. Jova Radevksa: Perfect Version— Alex Hook Radio Edit  
> LP: Up Against Me (for the scene on the bluffs at the end)  
> Mitch Murder: Heading South  
> Nigel Stanford feat. Elizaveta: Icarus— Automatic Mix  
> Oleg Byonic: The Sting— Original Mix  
> Ramseses B: We Are The Universe  
> Scandroid: I Remember You— Lucy in Disguise Remix  
> Sine: Take Me Higher  
> Tegan and Sarah: I Was A Fool— Phantom Ride Mix  
> Tilly And The Wall: Falling Without Knowing  
> Way Out West feat. Eli & Fur: Running Away 
> 
> >>> I also put “Where The Rose Is Sown” on briefly for the hanging because I wanted something I could sing with that sounded like people dancing. I wait here in this hole/Playing poker with my soul… So cheerful.
> 
> Did you know you just finished 50,000+ words of Troy Calypso having heatstroke? You could have read the average Kurt Vonnegut novel in the same amount of time, but you sat through this instead and I just… my heart. I appreciate you spending your time here so very much. 
> 
> I want another go with Tyreen driving, if only because people seem afraid to write for her. I don’t know— she was like slipping on an old pair of sneakers for me. I wouldn’t be tooling around in this neck of fandom otherwise. I wouldn’t have met so many amazing, fascinating, determined people. 
> 
> So, there you have it. There’s Satellite. It’s a grimy Borderlands fanfic. Thank you for reading it. You’re awesome and I hope you got a kick out of it. I’d love to hear your favorite part if you fancy dropping me a note. If not? Go. Be free. Don’t dream too hard about the arm hole thing. I still don’t believe I banging wrote that. 
> 
> -Mauser  
> 7/31/2020
> 
> PS: there’s more.  
> And this dumb essay: https://mauserfrau.tumblr.com/post/625273669786255360/satellite-conclusion


End file.
